Harmony Healthcare IT is pleased to recognize our role in the National Patient Safety Awareness Week that takes place March 12–18, 2017. This year’s theme is United in Safety.

Fifteen years ago, the Institute of Medicine brought public attention to the issue of medical errors and adverse events, and patient safety concerns remain a serious public health issue that must be tackled with a more pervasive response.

The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) convened an expert panel in February 2015 to assess the state of the patient safety field and set the stage for the next 15 years of work. The resulting report makes eight recommendations:

1. Ensure that leaders establish and sustain a safety culture
2. Create centralized and coordinated oversight of patient safety
3. Create a common set of safety metrics that reflect meaningful outcomes
4. Increase funding for research in patient safety and implementation science
5. Address safety across the entire care continuum
6. Support the health care workforce
7. Partner with patients and families for the safest care
8. Ensure that technology is safe and optimized to improve patient safety

Harmony Healthcare IT supports patient safety initiatives by providing healthcare providers with a robust, secure and searchable archive that keeps clinical health data accessible at the point of care. We are dedicated to #8 above and ensuring that technology is safe and optimized to improve patient safety, but it’s more than that.

Our team developed a four-step Data Availability plan to ensure that necessary health data is readily and easily available where it’s needed, when it’s needed and how it’s needed. We know that data availability is key to improving patient safety and patient outcomes.

Click here for more Data Availability information.

The U.S. Partnership for Patients, sponsored by the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services provides resources, support and guidance for patients and hospitals, alike. Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, with support from the Partnership for Patients, has extended its safety focused initiatives to include a program called Zero Hero. The program in its seventh year has reduced dangerous hospital errors by 80 percent.

The Zero Hero program has five recommendations that are universal and aimed especially at keeping children safe during a hospital stay. Click here to see the article.

Our work with Health Data Archiver to reduce legacy data silos and support data availability for the continuum of care specifically supports #4 which states:

Navigate My Care. Care must be well-coordinated and efficient, especially with the most complex medical conditions. Ultimately, better coordination and open channels of communication can prevent unnecessary hospital visits and speed response time when parents have a question or concern

Our team is encouraged by the many initiatives that are moving the quality of care for patients in a positive direction. Harmony Healthcare IT is positioned with technology solutions to provide healthcare experts with clinical health data at the point of care to improve patient safety and outcomes.

Spoliation is the destruction or significant alteration of evidence that denies opposing parties their due rights. While this word may cause you to think of intentional document shredding, video destruction or information deletion, it should also queue you to consider electronic health record (EHR) security.  Spoliation in the case of a legal suit against a healthcare organization could occur due to unreliable EHR systems that make clinical data impossible to locate or retrieve.

To be compliant with HIPAA requirements, healthcare organizations are charged with collecting, storing and providing retrievable protected health information.  So, when working with systems that store active or historical patient data, it is important to safeguard against spoliation as well as unintentional record damage or loss.

This is especially true during litigation and eDiscovery where healthcare organizations are expected to be able to produce clinical and other health data in a reasonable time-frame.  The potential for being cited for spoliation in litigation or a regulatory investigation is one of the greatest exposures corporations have under the stipulations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Further, courts in some jurisdictions will allow mistaken and negligent conduct to form the basis of a claim for destruction of evidence.

Being cited for spoliation could result not only in severe sanctions and fines, but also in public embarrassment from exposure on the front pages of widely read industry publications. Therefore, information systems’ architecture choices necessitate a conversation between the CIO and legal counsel to ensure that proper systems are in place.

Such a possibility puts a great burden on the storage mechanisms and applications being utilized to protect records for a required retention period. The challenge of ensuring record reliability grows in proportion to the length of time the electronic records must be retained. As it pertains to medical record storage, retention periods can range from as little as three to seven years, or – depending on record, medical specialty or facility types — to as long as 25+ years . . . or even in perpetuity.

Harmony Healthcare IT works with healthcare organizations of all sizes to implement solutions which ensure that clinical data is securely preserved and readily available for eDiscovery. Our industry-leading Health Data Archiver has many features built-in to combat spoliation, including:

• The archived database is immutable, meaning data that is archived is static in nature can cannot be deleted or removed. It can be struck through to be marked in error, but not manually deleted.
• The purge rules capability dictates when data can be expunged first in a non-searchable, but available method (soft purge), and subsequently by a deletion event (hard purge). This is driven by retention policies tied to purge rules.
• All activity, from login to logout, including purge activity, is tracked via audit logs, certificates of destruction and reporting.

For more information about eDiscovery and Healthcare Record Retention, download our white paper.

Make sure your organization’s clinical health data is preserved and secure. Our team can help you run a health assessment on systems and develop a plan to safeguard your data from spoliation.

Commvault Partners with Harmony Healthcare IT to enable Commvault customers to access, manage and protect data from retired legacy applications

HIMSS17, Orlando, FL and Tinton Falls, NJ – February 21, 2017 – Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT), a global leader in enterprise backup, recovery, archive and the cloud for the healthcare market, today announced a technology collaboration with Harmony Healthcare IT, a leading provider of services and solutions that safeguard patient information, ensure cash flow, and increase productivity. Through the integration of the Commvault Data Platform with Harmony Healthcare IT’s archiving solution, Health Data Archiver, healthcare customers can manage the complicated process of decommissioning legacy applications by retiring Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems while enabling them to access and protect important clinical and business data. Today’s announcement was made at HIMSS 2017, being held Feb. 19 – Feb. 23, in Orlando.

In addition to data management and protection, customers using the Commvault Data Platform with Heath Data Archiver gain increased analytics capabilities by having data from decommissioned applications available for indexing and reporting through Commvault Software, as well as expanded eDiscovery and search functionality.

“We are pleased to team up with Commvault to empower healthcare providers to embrace holistic data management strategies that modernize the way they manage, migrate and share clinical data,” said Tom Liddell, CEO, Harmony Healthcare IT. “With the addition of our product and services, Commvault Clinical Archive gives customers the power to derive the most value out of all data, regardless of whether it’s in production use or from decommissioned applications.”

The collaboration between Commvault and Harmony Healthcare IT, extends Commvault’s data management portfolio and archiving capabilities in EHR and ERP application decommissioning. In tandem with Commvault Clinical Archive, announced at HIMSS last year, Commvault is transforming the way healthcare providers are managing, migrating and retiring EHR, and other legacy applications. As a result, customers are breaking down data silos, reducing storage costs and complexity, enable better data sharing, and eliminating the burden of maintaining and supporting legacy applications.

“As healthcare providers recognize the tremendous operational and financial benefits in decommissioning outdated legacy applications, data from those systems will still need to be accessed, managed and protected since it often needs to be retained for business, compliance and regulatory reasons,” said Ananth Balasubramanian, General Manager of Commvault’s Healthcare Solutions Group. “With customers now able to use Health Data Archiver to decommission legacy applications, they can optimize healthcare IT operations, reducing maintenance application costs, while accessing and managing critical clinical and business data.”

Harmony Healthcare IT and Commvault will both be exhibiting at the HIMSS17 Conference & Exhibition on February 19-23. Commvault will be at booth #1703. Harmony Healthcare IT will be at booth #7760

About Commvault Healthcare

Commvault is a leading provider of data protection and information management solutions, helping healthcare organizations worldwide handle massive volumes of data, meet compliance requirements and deliver quality patient care. Through its single integrated platform, the Commvault Data Platform, Commvault provides healthcare organizations with enterprise data protection, enabling them to scale infrastructure easily and cost-effectively while maintaining the security and privacy of patient information. Commvault Software includes data encryption capabilities, enabling healthcare providers to meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and other patient data privacy compliance requirements.

About Commvault

Commvault is a leading provider of data protection and information management solutions, helping companies worldwide activate their data to drive more value and business insight and to transform modern data environments. With solutions and services delivered directly and through a worldwide network of partners and service providers, Commvault solutions comprise one of the industry’s leading portfolios in data protection and recovery, cloud, virtualization, archive, file sync and share. Commvault has earned accolades from customers and third party influencers for its technology vision, innovation, and execution as an independent and trusted expert. Without the distraction of a hardware business or other business agenda, Commvault’s sole focus on data management has led to adoption by companies of all sizes, in all industries, and for solutions deployed on premise, across mobile platforms, to and from the cloud, and provided as-a-service. Commvault employs more than 2,700 highly skilled individuals across markets worldwide, is publicly traded on NASDAQ (CVLT), and is headquartered in Tinton Falls, New Jersey in the United States. To learn more about Commvault — and how it can help make your data work for you — visit commvault.com.

About Harmony Healthcare IT

Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data from healthcare provider systems – both ambulatory and acute. Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, the company’s mission is to preserve vital information that will improve lives. Harmony Healthcare IT employs experts in data extraction, migration, retention, integration and analytics to provide trusted solutions. Working with hundreds of systems, billions of records and terabytes of data, Harmony Healthcare IT — with its product, Health Data Archiver — provides clients with access to historical records. Simply.  Visit Harmony Healthcare IT at HIMSS17, Booth #7760, Feb. 19-23, 2017 in Orlando. 

Safe Harbor Statement: Customers’ results may differ materially from those stated herein; Commvault does not guarantee that all customers can achieve benefits similar to those stated above. This press release may contain forward-looking statements, including statements regarding financial projections, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, such as competitive factors, difficulties and delays inherent in the development, manufacturing, marketing and sale of software products and related services, general economic conditions and others. Statements regarding Commvault’s beliefs, plans, expectations or intentions regarding the future are forward-looking statements, within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from anticipated results. Commvault does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements. The development and timing of any product release as well as any of its features or functionality remain at our sole discretion.

©1999-2017 Commvault Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Commvault, Commvault and logo, the “C hexagon” logo, Commvault Systems, Solving Forward, SIM, Singular Information Management, OnePass, Commvault Galaxy, Unified Data Management, QiNetix, Quick Recovery, QR, CommNet, GridStor, Vault Tracker, InnerVault, Quick Snap, QSnap, IntelliSnap, Recovery Director, CommServe, CommCell, ROMS, Commvault Edge, and CommValue are trademarks or registered trademarks of Commvault Systems, Inc. All other third party brands, products, service names, trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of and used to identify the products or services of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change without notice.

Information security will be a hot topic at HIMSS17 next week in Orlando.  Global information security specialist Robert Herjavec, who will co-lead a keynote session with fellow Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, is bullish on big opportunities in health care but noted that new technologies bring new vulnerability and threats. Much like a school of sharks surrounding its prey, security threats loom over hospitals and health systems in the form of breach, malware, fraud, theft and loss among other cybersecurity risks.

In a recent article in Healthcare IT News, Herjavec says: There are significant information processing requirements and investments made each year, and it can be difficult to keep them all up-to-date, patched, and refreshed. This is partly due to the technology push into medical treatments, and partly due to constant pressure to keep non-clinical costs down. The result is a higher-than-average legacy “debt” of outdated systems, unpatched operating systems, and older browsers.

We often see exactly what Herjavec is describing as hospitals and ambulatory centers focus on updating their go-forward EHR system, yet struggle, or worse yet – don’t take any action on what to do with legacy clinical and operational systems that are dragging down performance and also pose security risks. It is important to remember that legacy data must adhere to privacy and security policies just like any other system or network.

“In today’s connected electronic environment, healthcare organizations are big targets for phishing attacks, ransomware attacks and unauthorized third-party network hacking,” says Rick Adams, Vice President of IT and HIPAA Privacy and Compliance Officer at Harmony Healthcare IT. “IT teams need to be prepared like never before. It’s not a matter of “if” there will be an attack, but “when” — and the entire organization needs to be trained to be on-guard and prepared.”

Read more from Rick Adams in his blog post: How One Click Could Shut Down Your EHR.

Many organizations are moving forward with an archive as an integral part of their clinical data management strategy. Health Data Archiver is positioned to support a secure enterprise-wide legacy data management effort, which is especially helpful if your organization is experiencing any of the following common business situations:

• Merger & acquisition
• Vendor consolidation
• Vendor or product dissatisfaction
• Product sunsets
• Facility closure/relocation
• Provider retirement/death

With a solution like Health Data Archiver, your healthcare organization will have a single, secure, vendor-neutral system for quick access to legacy data when needed. This eliminates the need to keep out-of-production systems running as well as the need to keep staff trained on how to use them. There is an obvious cost savings too since if legacy systems are not decommissioned, the maintenance costs continue to build and historical data would potentially remain segmented in disparate legacy systems.

In terms of information security, there are benefits to an archive:

Health Data Archiver System Administration and Security Features

• User Security (Role-based) – View/print/export by user roles (i.e., MD, psychiatrist, HIM, etc.), LDAP groups and/or data source.
• User & Activity Audit Log – Captures activity from login to logout. Date and time stamps access and activity logs for audits/ reporting.  Logs produced are compatible with 3rd party audit software such as P2Sentinel and FairWarning.
• Data Encryption – Industry-standard encryption. Data accessed only through the user interface. Data at rest is encrypted per National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines.
• Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) Single Sign-On – An XML-based, open-standard data format for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties. This technology allows for the integration into an EHR browser for seamless navigation between the EHR and the archive.

Our Health Data Archiver team of clinical and ERP data archiving experts is ready to demo how this industry leading archive can help your healthcare organization preserve needed records in a secure and easily accessible format.

We’ll help you navigate your sea of clinical data . . . like a shark.

Harmony Healthcare IT is a FairWarning Ready Healthcare Data Industry Partner.

FairWarning^® is a registered trademark of FairWarning, Inc.

In a recent article by Becker’s Hospital Review, the author suggests that hospitals face the same low margins, high cost structures and gradual loss of revenue as big box stores. We found it intriguing to consider whether there are lessons for healthcare organizations to learn from the recent bankruptcies of retail giants Sports Authority, Golfsmith and others.

The article points out some similarities that deserve a closer look.  First, large hospitals and health systems operate at a 0 to 10 percent margin and no more. Second, hospitals have a very high cost structure, roughly half of which is comprised of overhead costs that are difficult to change.  These small margins and high overhead leave big box stores and hospitals vulnerable to erosion of revenues.  Further, the article points to current and impending changes in healthcare that need to be addressed before it’s too late, including: the movement to outpatient care, changes in reimbursement levels and the loss of little pieces of services to ancillary providers and alternative care settings.

Thinking Out of the Box by Cutting Costs on Legacy Systems

While there are some costs that are tough for a hospital to cut, it can easily reduce spending by decommissioning legacy systems in its information technology (IT) portfolio.  When you consider that some hospitals allow a dozen or more out-of-production patient and employee systems to keep running to meet record retention regulations for the next 7-25+ years, there IS room for savings.  Amplify that across a multi-hospital health system with an active ambulatory merger and acquisition strategy and imagine the savings possible.

Including a healthcare legacy data management solution like Harmony Healthcare IT’s Health Data Archiver (HDA) into the healthcare organization’s IT strategy is smart on many levels.  There are significant cost savings, it’s easy to access historical records and there are other benefits, including:

• Compliance with HIPAA and HR record retention regulations
• Mitigation of technical risk and reduction of infrastructure costs
• Consolidation of historical records into a single repository for go-forward management
• Savings in eDiscovery costs and HIM release of information workflow processes over time
• Return on Investment of 18-24 months on average

Adjusting to Change

Adjusting business operations to include an archive is just one smart step facilities can take to strive for greater financial security as the healthcare delivery landscape continues to change.  The biggest lesson learned from the big box retail stores may be that, in any industry, changes must be anticipated and adjustments to overhead costs are mandatory to continue to be financially viable for years to come.  We thought the article was a good read and encourage you to check it out.

Interested in more information including a detailed road map for your hospital to take an inventory of its current legacy systems?  Contact us, we can help.  Going to HIMSS17?  Schedule a Health Data Archiver demo at Booth #7760, Feb 19-23, 2017 in Orlando, or, attend our session (IDIZ17) “Data Availability Plan for Legacy Systems” at 10:30am ET on 2/21/17 at HIMSS.

Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT) will focus on “data availability” as a key message at HIMSS17 in Orlando’s Orange County Convention Center from Feb. 19-23, 2017. Through a scheduled HIMSS session (ID# IZ17), in-booth presentations and software demos, our team will help attendees explore data availability planning as an alternative to costly and complex ERP and EMR data conversions.

Understand our approach to data extraction, migration, retention and destruction at HHIT booths #7760 or #7785-06. Contact us prior to the event for an individualized demo appointment for your organization or stop by either booth during show floor hours.

Attend the presentation, “Data Availability Plan for Legacy Systems” (Session ID IZ17) from 10:30 – 10:50 am EST on Tuesday, Feb. 21 in the theater area of the Innovation Zone. Health systems or hospitals that have replaced systems or are in acquisition mode are encouraged to attend the presentation by Scott Kidder, VP of Business Development at HHIT who will discuss:

• Strategies for managing legacy data when an EMR or ERP system is replaced
• The impact of managing legacy data on clinician, HIM, legal, HR and IT users
• The benefits of data archiving to satisfy retention requirements
• A look ahead at the proliferation of health data volume with a focus on maintaining legacy data

HAbout Harmony Healthcare IT – Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data from hundreds of healthcare systems – both ambulatory and acute. Headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, the company employs experts in data extraction, migration, archival, integration and analytics to provide its clients with trusted data solutions. Working with hundreds of systems, billions of records and terabytes of data, Harmony Healthcare IT provides clients with access to historical records. Simply.

For more information about Health Data Archiver, click here.

Computer Programs and Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CPSI), a leading provider of healthcare information solutions to rural and community hospitals, recently announced that it has completed its acquisition of Healthland Holding Inc. and its affiliates.

What does this mean for Healthland Users?
Just over a year ago, we reported that while CPSI initially mentioned plans to support and invest in Healthland’s Centriq platform, it only mentioned plans to support (but not invest) in the Healthland Classic platform.  In that blog, we explored what that might mean to Heathland EHR users and discussed data archiving as a potential pathway should legacy systems require decommissioning.

In a later blog, we provided a useful link to HISTalk’s webinar called “CPSI’s Takeover of Healthland” featuring Vince Ciotti and Frank Poggio.  Vince and Frank’s message was aimed largely at the approximately 1,000 hospitals and LTC/PAC facilities affected by CPSI’s acquisition of Healthland. They advised that, based on other major EMR/HIS takeovers, hospitals can get burned when the acquirer forces clients into a “take it or leave it” situation.

Next Steps
We encourage you to read each blog and to learn more about Health Data Archiver, a long-term patient data storage application that makes historical records available where you need them, when you need them. It allows legacy EMR systems, which in this case may be Healthland or CPSI, to get decommissioned and their maintenance costs, technical risks and IT labor burdens eliminated.

Get Started
Are you a current Healthland user impacted by the CPSI acquisition? Will you soon replace Healthland with another EMR?  Should you need assistance with Heathland EHR decommissioning, data extraction, migration or retention, contact our Healthland experts today.