Currently, there are about 800,000 people living in the nation’s 30,000 assisted living facilities with steady growth expected to continue. Most are over the age of 85. And, of the approximately 20 diseases defined as chronic conditions, it is common for senior living residents to have between four and eight conditions.

Baby boomers (ages 52-70) account for approximately 72 million individuals in the United States in 2019 and this enormous group will soon be making decisions about whether senior living is the right option for their aging loved ones, and eventually for themselves.

This aging of the population, and propensity for chronic illness, will increase demand for all forms of long-term care. For this reason, it’s likely that what Elara Caring CEO G. Scott Herman recently said in an interview with Home Health Care News is true: there will continue to be “…an uptick in consolidation across the industry . . . [with] a need to consolidate fragmented markets . . . [and] a need to consolidate data in order to manage chronically ill patients.”

Other healthcare executives agree. In a survey conducted by Capital One Healthcare, the highest growth segments in healthcare services over the next year includes:

• 46% IT services
• 30% home health and hospice
• 8% insurance providers
• 8% assisted living and skilled nursing

Providing comprehensive care for residents across the continuum of senior living to assisted living and hospice centers often consists of an involved medical history that spans many decades. With the surge in merger and acquisition growth in long-term care, lifecycle data management of the patient medical record will continue to be a critical issue to address, as the patient’s records may be scattered across many systems.

As the push for data consolidation continues, and mergers and acquisitions proceed, electronic health record (EHR) systems will be replaced. Often, cost and technology constraints mean it doesn’t make business sense to migrate all the older records into the new system. However, the need to comply with record retention, and to maintain easy access to what could be imperative legacy data still exists. That’s when it makes sense to consolidate numerous legacy data silos into a single archive, accessible via Single Sign-On from an EHR.

Ready to find out how Harmony Healthcare IT and HealthData Archiver^® can help put your long-term care center’s legacy data management plan in motion?

Connect with our team, we’re ready to chat.

Right now, the EHR mergers and acquisitions story is like an action movie full of adventure.

The output of new standards and interoperability requirements has created fierce competition between EHR vendors to see who can evolve their product the quickest and best. It’s this kind of competitive environment that leads to survival of the fittest which means, naturally, only some EHRs will weather the storm – but which ones?

In recent years, following numerous M&As, the number of EHR vendors has dwindled from 1,000-plus a decade ago to approximately 400 now, according to KLAS Research.

In fact, ONC data and other independent research outfits estimate that Epic and Cerner account for approximately a 50% share in the Acute Care Hospital Market. This is mostly among larger hospitals, but the footprint continues to expand even in hospitals with <200 beds. With the trend toward hospital-physician employment, it’s no surprise that Epic and Cerner are dominating the market.

As the landscape is molded by mergers and acquisitions, consistent EHR replacements are following suit. However, these go-forward EHR solutions often lack one thing – legacy data migrated over from the displaced system. This means that either the legacy system will need to be maintained so read-only PHI can be accessed to ensure retention compliance, or that the data in the system will need to be extracted and archived.

The problem with leaving the former EHR solution up in read-only mode is not only that maintenance fees still apply but that, over time, technical risk on an aging system looms. That’s why, as the EHR market continues to consolidate and sunset certain products, it’s smart for affected provider EHR users to put a legacy data management strategy in place.

Benefits to legacy data archiving

In any of the following scenarios, it’s likely that legacy data archiving is an attractive alternative compared to the more cost prohibitive legacy data conversion to a new EHR:

• If your EHR vendor merges with another EHR vendor
• If your EHR gets sunsetted or the vendor goes out of business
• If your healthcare facility decides to switch to a new EHR for functionality purposes or so it can better meet its clinical documentation needs

When you look at the real cost of maintaining multiple legacy systems, including licensing, maintenance and support as well as the associated internal IT labor burden, the ongoing management of outdated or displaced systems becomes difficult to justify. Add in the risk of old systems becoming obsolete and unsupported, and it’s clear that the business value and strategic benefits of adopting an EHR archive to keep legacy data searchable, manageable, and HIPAA-compliant is in the best interest of your organization’s long-term vision.

Has your organization been affected by an EHR vendor merger or acquisition? Are you switching to a new EHR as a result?

Now is the time to investigate the long-term cost and ease-of-use benefits an archive solution like HealthData Archiver^® brings to the table.  Check out how a solution like this can preserve legacy data in a safe, secure and searchable solution.

The guise of anonymity has made the dark web a playground for criminal activity. Although true that there is harmless content to be found there, it’s most known for providing access to illegal content and products. But these things aren’t just given away.  Stolen information, illicit substances, and other dangerous items­ – they all come at a price, one that isn’t as high as you might think.

Any guesses what $1,000 on the dark web might get you? The answer – one full medical record. One medical record that includes date of birth, credit card information, Social Security number, address, and email. The years of damage that could be inflicted from fraudulent use of this personal information has a far higher literal and proverbial price tag than $1,000.

Cybersecurity Ventures predicted that cybercrime damages will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021 – exponentially more than the damage inflicted from natural disasters in a year, and more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.

It’s widely reported that more than 90 percent of successful hacks and data breaches, which lead to the access of the information being sold on the dark web, stem from phishing scams, emails crafted to lure their recipients to click a link, open a document or forward information to someone they shouldn’t.

Fortunately, it seems that these statistics are being noticed.

In the 2019 HIMSS Cybersecurity Report, positive advances are noted specifically in healthcare cybersecurity practices. Based on information gathered from 166 U.S. based health information security professionals, 55% state current budgets have increased security allocations and 96% say their organization implements comprehensive risk assessments.

However, there’s still a lot of room to shore up security risks.

One of the biggest areas for improvement relates to legacy operating systems that are more prone to vulnerabilities. Of those surveyed in the report:

• 69% indicated that they had at least some legacy operating systems in place at their healthcare organizations
• 83% of those still operate with Legacy Windows Servers (e.g., 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016 and XP)
• 14% of respondents said over 10% of their systems qualify as a legacy operating system

Couple the outdated operating systems with legacy EHR and ERP applications, and security risks are greatly amplified.

Facing ever-increasing cyber attacks, and breaches that could have massive implications for patients, it’s time for organizations with unprotected legacy systems to find a better way. It’s time to archive.

Regularly called on to help clients address their long-term EHR and ERP data lifecycle management strategies, Harmony Healthcare IT offers a legacy data archiving solution  that consolidates data stores, reduces out-of-production system maintenance costs, mitigates technical risk, complies with record retention mandates and offers both interoperability and data analytics capabilities. And, most of all, it provides increased security from cyber attacks, protecting both your organization and your patients.

Ready to make the move toward blocking cybercrimes? Let’s talk.

Is your healthcare organization in the midst of EHR replacement? A merger or acquisition? Or, maybe it’s focused on consolidating outdated legacy EHR systems?

If you’re creating a system decommissioning plan, the data management vendors you choose to work with are as important as the archiving product being offered.  It’s necessary to evaluate both.

Here’s a list of absolute essentials to help assess a potential data archiving partner before making a final selection.

10 QUALITIES TO LOOK FOR IN A LEGACY DATA ARCHIVING VENDOR

1. Exhibits a strong reputation and breadth of experience working with data from a variety of systems
2. Focused primarily on healthcare and able to provide references from similar organizations and projects
3. Does not have a history of litigation or data breach
4. Responsive and easy to do business with
5. Routinely updates product to ensure high level security of records for the duration of the retention period
6. Able to scale with client needs, such as a having a strategy for enabling compliance with the 21^st Century Cures Act
7. Does minimal to no outsourcing for its extract/transform/load (ETL) work
8. Offers an in-depth legacy system discovery and proposal process that limits future change orders
9. Offers a systematic on-boarding process and project management methodology
10. Conducts frequent quality checkpoints from extraction through validation to archive deployment

Ready to get your legacy data management plan on track with a partner who meets all these criteria? We’re ready to chat.

Editor’s Note: This blog has been updated from the original post on April 3, 2019.

Recently, Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago reportedly fired at least 50 nurses and other staff members for improperly viewing the medical records of actor Jussie Smollett, NBC Chicago reports. This story is a reminder of the responsibility and importance of protecting medical information not only from external risks, but from internal ones as well.

In contrast to all other sectors, the healthcare industry is unique in that the biggest security threat comes from within. In fact, according to Verizon’s 2018 Protected Health Information Breach Report in which they analyzed 1,368 healthcare data breaches, insiders were responsible for almost 58% of all breaches with external factors confirmed as responsible for just 42% of incidents.

Attempting to circumvent internal breach behavior, the CERT^® Division of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University announced the creation of the CERT National Insider Threat Center (NITC). Established in late 2017, the Center expands on years of work in the insider threat domain and helps to support security practitioners with insider threat assistance. Several alarming statistics the NITC has found include:

• Most people looking to commit healthcare fraud from the inside began their malicious activities within the first five years of working for the organization (64.3%)
• When the location of the activity was known, 72.7% happened onsite
• Of the attacks when the time was known, 70% of the incidents happened during normal working hours
• Over half of the incidents (52.7%) involved the theft of customer data, while 37.5% targeted financial assets

Helpful Resources and Tips to Guard Your Organization’s PHI

With internal attacks continuing to be as much of a challenge as external, there are a few things to consider when evaluating the safety of PHI:

• Are all vendors vetted for having solid security measures? It’s important that outside parties are as invested in protecting your data as you are. Check out these 10 privacy and security questions to ask potential partners as you navigate the process.
• Do you have any aging applications that are vulnerable to cyber attacks? When health systems are outdated, the risk for breach exponentially increases. Listen in as Rick Adams, Vice President of IT and Chief Security Officer at Harmony Healthcare IT, talks about the hazards of leaving legacy systems running.
• Is your legacy data management plan in place? Security risks lurk in forgotten legacy systems – proactively creating a plan that includes decommissioning legacy systems and safely archiving the necessary data is an imperative component to your risk strategy. Read more about the benefits of archiving and how to handle legacy data management after system replacement here.

If it’s time to put legacy data management at the forefront of your cybersecurity task list, we’re ready to listen and here to help.

Happy HIP Week! Our team at Harmony Healthcare IT recognizes all of the talented and dedicated data and information management professionals during this, the 30^th annual Health Information Professionals (HIP) Week.  We couldn’t agree more with Dawn Paulson, MJ, RHIA, CHPS, CPHI and Robyn Stambaugh, MS, RHIA, when they say that HIM professionals “have unique competencies and skills that are essential in the accuracy, accessibility, delivery, and integrity of health data.”

For all of that, thank you!

The American Health Information Management Association’s (AHIMA) 2019 theme is Health Informational Professionals—Driven by Health Data. This includes efforts to ensure the availability, accuracy, integrity, and security of all data related to patient healthcare encounters, thus achieving better clinical and business decisions that enhance healthcare quality.

The Harmony Healthcare IT team values the work and mission of our colleagues involved in health information management, and we take pride in our role as a trusted partner working towards the big picture or improving healthcare outcomes.

Recognizing that HealthData Archiver^® is a respected solution counted on by HIM professionals nationwide, we are committed to continuing to strengthen our platform and deliver capabilities necessary for you to more easily, efficiently and securely do your job.

Congratulations to everyone involved in HIP Week – we couldn’t do data archiving without you. #HIPWeek19 #welovehealthinformationprofessionals

South Bend, IN — March 19, 2019 — Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT), an industry leader in data extraction, migration and archival solutions, announced today that Primus Capital (Primus) has made a growth investment in the future of the company. Brentwood Capital Advisors LLC (BCA) served as the exclusive financial advisor.

The investment will accelerate HHIT’s strong performance with its flagship product, HealthData Archiver^®, as well as other services aimed to reduce the expense of legacy data management while preserving vital information. The management team at HHIT will continue to be actively involved in day-to-day operations as well as in strategic planning to further advance and expand the company.

HealthData Archiver^® is a data management platform providing a single point of access to historical patient, employee or business data for healthcare enterprises.  The web-based solution, with its release of information workflows, Single Sign-On integrated clinical views, revenue cycle features and eDiscovery capabilities, provides a significant return on investment for healthcare delivery organizations decommissioning legacy systems.  The solution consolidates data stores, reduces out-of-production system maintenance costs, mitigates technical risk, complies with record retention mandates and offers both interoperability and data analytics capabilities.

“Harmony Healthcare IT is recognized for its industry-leading solutions and broad expertise in extracting, migrating and transforming data from the widest variety of systems. The Company is positioned for continued growth as providers rationalize their software portfolios,” says Phil Molner, Managing Partner of Primus.  Chris Welch, Director of Primus, added, “Primus is pleased to add a leading data management firm to its investment portfolio and excited to partner with the leadership team to build upon the Company’s successes to date.”

“Primus offers one of the strongest healthcare technology disciplines among growth investors,” says Tom Liddell, Chief Executive Officer at HHIT. “We could not be more excited for this investment, which will accelerate our delivery of legacy data management services to healthcare enterprises.  While we specialize in clinical and financial systems, we also provide a comprehensive approach to legacy data management for enterprise resource planning, accounting, human resources and other business systems. We look forward to this next step in our evolution.”

About Harmony Healthcare IT and HealthData Archiver^®®
Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data from hundreds of healthcare applications – 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, interoperability and analytics to provide its clients with trusted solutions. Working with hundreds of software brands, billions of records and petabytes of data, Harmony Healthcare IT — with its product, HealthData Archiver^® — provides clients with access to historical records. Simply.  For more about Harmony Healthcare IT, visit www.harmonyhit.com.

About Primus
Founded in 1984 and with offices in Cleveland and Atlanta, Primus is a growth-oriented private equity firm focused on investing in leading healthcare, software, and technology-enabled services companies.  We are currently managing Primus Capital Fund VIII, building on a long history of successful investing.  We have invested in over 130 companies, partnering with exceptional management teams to accelerate growth and create shareholder value by applying our industry knowledge, financial resources, and investment experience. For more about Primus, visit www.primuscapital.com.

About Brentwood Capital Advisors
Based in Franklin, Tennessee, Brentwood Capital Advisors is one of the South’s leading boutique investment banks, providing mergers and acquisitions and capital raising advice to privately-held, middle-market healthcare, technology and tech-enabled and outsourced services companies. BCA has served as exclusive financial advisor in 99 successfully closed transactions totaling approximately $6.4 billion in value in these sectors. Founded in 1999, the firm is partner-owned and has 19 investment banking professionals. For more about BCA, visit www.brentwoodcapital.com .

The value of electronic health records is undeniable, but physicians nationwide are upset over the complexity that often comes with the process. According to the Harvard Business Review, physicians spend half their time using EHRs.  That nets out to an annual cost of over $365 billion dollars – more than the U.S. spends treating any major class of diseases.

In an industry where time is money, and in which clear records could be a literal matter of life and death, it’s time to make some adjustments – for the benefit of both physicians and patients.

1. Embrace Innovation – EHRs are intended to make life easier, not harder. When new EHR technology is adopted, it’s essential that users be adequately trained, with a focus on their specific needs and abilities. In addition, your EHR vendor relationship should be ongoing, with the opportunity to reach out with questions about the technology at any time and continuous training as platforms are updated. Along the way, anyone using the technology should actively engage in seeking out tools such as shortcuts and templates. These types of innovations could exponentially streamline the EHR workflow.
2. Get involved – The best way for care providers to influence how their EHR system functions is to provide EHR vendors feedback. One way to do that is to identify potential problems by either conducting EHR safety surveys or designating a safety team. Another is to utilize enhanced training methods, such as simulated clinical environments, to provide direct feedback. It is also recommended that formal usability assessments be performed. Designating safety experts to advise on EHR implementation, customization, and use can also help minimize confusion and frustration, and improve workflow.
3. Incorporate an archive – As EHR systems are replaced, a full data conversion from the old system to the new is often too costly and complex. Often, providers convert only demographics and key clinical data elements to the new system. That leaves historical medical record information left behind, causing clinicians and HIM professionals to search information in more than one system.  Migrating all the legacy patient data into a consolidated, secure and easily searchable archive – and then decommissioning the outdated systems – is a step towards increasing efficiency.  Single Sign-On access from the EHR to the archive is an important feature that allows clinicians to access historical records at time of care.  And, other archive features like batch, quick or template printing allows health information management (HIM) professionals to more readily fulfill release of information requests for patients and other parties.
4. Delegate – Arming physicians with one or two clinical assistants allows for the workload to be dispersed. Physicians can focus on patient care while the rest of the team provides in-room support, performs real-time information retrieval, and documents visit notes. This ensures thorough service while minimizing the bottleneck and relieving the physician of intensive clerical work.

It’s no secret that the increasing documentation standards expected by payers has also become an EHR hinderance. It’s reported that the U.S. is required to provide 2/3 more information than other countries.* While inroads have been made over the past years through initiatives like Patients Over Paperwork, intense documentation requirements still take a toll on providers.  Taking some of the steps above to proactively streamline EHR workflows can help prevent physician burnout and keep patients safe.

*Haas, D.A., Halamka, J.D., Suk, M. “3 Ways to Make Electronic Health Records Less Time-Consuming for Physicians.” Harvard Business Review Web. January 2019.

At the end of 2017, health care bankruptcies accounted for 7.25% of all U.S. bankruptcy filings, with filings tripling between 2016 and 2017. David Neier, partner at Winston & Strawn LLC, attributed the trend to regulatory changes, technological advances, and the rise of urgent care facilities.

As financial stressors continue to plague hospitals and other healthcare companies, it’s reasonable to believe that the surge of bankruptcies and restructurings will continue, and not improbable that some of those occurrences could happen without much warning. In such instances, it leaves a looming question – what happens to the patient data?

Yes, HIPAA protocol requires hospitals to have an EHR contingency plan in place that is supposed to address four components: a data backup plan, a disaster recovery plan, an emergency-mode operations plan, and testing and revision procedures. And a 2016 report put out by the Office of Inspector General found that 95% of hospitals surveyed had an EHR contingency plan in place, with most of them including all four suggested components.

But what about the 5% without a plan? As insignificant as that percentage might seem, being a patient at a hospital without a contingency plan can result in major complications.

In fact, for 21 year-old Caitlin Secrist, it’s become a life or death matter.

Back in 2017, Secrist found herself at the ED in Florence Hospital at Anthem with her first pancreatitis attack. The severity of her condition now necessitates that she be fed via a feeding tube.  To make sure she gets imperative nutrients, Caitlin constantly wears a backpack that pumps what she needs into her intestines every day.

After several surgeries to try to help remedy her condition, Secrist’s gastroenterologist recommended she undergo more extensive surgery to remove her pancreas, spleen, and appendix. The Johns Hopkins surgeon slated to operate said bowel disorders can be mistaken for pancreatitis, and wanted to look at all of Caitlin’s past medical records, including the initial images taken at Florence Hospital, to confirm the pancreatitis diagnosis was correct. This is where it gets complicated.

Since Secrist’s hospital stay, Florence Hospital had declared bankruptcy and closed its doors. And without a contingency plan in place, and money owed to multiple businesses including Medhost – the company handling the hospital’s electronic health records – it happened that original medical records were made inaccessible to patients and doctors. Essentially, medical records were stuck in limbo as creditors figured out how they were going to get paid and which company would take on the cost of getting into the EHR. Those initial records Secrist’s surgeon needed in order to operate were being held hostage all because a contingency plan had never been put in place.

Fortunately, it appears that there’s a solution on the horizon. Recently, two of the companies owed money agreed to make Florence Hospital’s EHRs accessible for 90 days. Although another company owed money opposed the plan as it would cut into the compensation they’re looking to recoup, a Maricopa Superior Court judge overseeing the case ruled in favor of moving forward to open the records. There’s still a possibility of appeal, but for now it looks as though Secrist will finally be able to get her records so she can have the procedure she so critically needs.

Preparing for an unexpected exit can be a difficult task but considering market trends, it’s a necessity. Harmony Healthcare IT can help you develop a comprehensive legacy data management plan to proactively ready for any unforeseen circumstances that could arise. Contact us to learn how HealthData Archiver^® can help protect your patients and their data today and in the future.

In 2018, Cone Health in North Carolina received a call from a Florida-based detective inquiring whether a fastener serial number from a hip implant would be enough information to identify a dead body. The detective knew, from the manufacturer, that the fastener shipped to the health system in 2009, but, that was all he had for clues.

With tens of millions of patient records before them, the Cone Health team went to work, querying its archived data.  Within hours, they managed to both identify the patient and help solve the case.

Accessibility to legacy patient data is critical, but can be a challenge if it is stored in multiple disparate systems. Employing an archiving strategy not only reduces data silos and streamlines search, but also defends against a cyber attack by limiting the number of open doors and windows created by outdated technology.

There are many reasons to archive legacy data. And many benefits to doing so, including:

• Compliance with medical record retention requirements
• Risk reduction of losing data as technology and equipment ages
• Cost reduction from streamlining the number of operating systems
• Simplified access to data

There’s also a chance that a detective will call with an unusual request.

Archive for the win.

Read or download the full Cone Health Data Archiving Case Study.

Connect with us to protect your legacy data.