The Organization Parkview Health is a not-for-profit, community-based health system serving northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio. With more than 9,700 employees, Parkview is the region’s largest employer with nine hospitals and a network of primary care and specialty physicians. The Situation In 2011, Parkview installed Epic. Its migration to a single-platform electronic health record (EHR) displaced about 50 clinical applications from over a dozen vendors. With so many legacy systems in its portfolio, the organization contracted with an EMR archiving vendor to archive its first acute care system and provide access to the legacy data. Parkview soon learned that the vendor was not equipped to manage the project. The organization was not pleased with the process, the time frame or the end product. As a result, Parkview went back to the drawing board to find EHR archive vendors better suited to meet their objectives of complying with medical record retention regulations and reducing legacy system maintenance costs. In doing so, Parkview Health also realized it needed to establish a standard process for archiving. Rick Miller, IS Director of Corporate Solutions Parkview Health “Our archiving project is back on track now, moving forward with success because of Harmony Healthcare IT. The Harmony team has the highest level of integrity as well as a real interest in our company. We share a common goal of success, which is my definition of a true partnership. Parkview has learned to include archiving in every future endeavor. Archiving now is a part of life, and the process developed by Harmony Healthcare IT has become our de facto standard.” The Solution In its second attempt to archive patient data, Parkview contracted with Harmony Healthcare IT (HHIT), a technology firm with a mission to improve lives by preserving vital information. With its people, process and technology engineered to support a consultative approach to health data management, HHIT readily assessed Parkview’s disparate data stores and went to work on its first archive project. Successful in that execution, HHIT quickly got Parkview’s archive initiative back on track and then recommended a comprehensive long-term strategy to consolidate the remainder of the legacy systems. Archive Benefits Consolidation of Parkview’s legacy data into a single, vendorneutral, easy-to-use archive solution has yielded many benefits, which include: Bypassing the complexity of a data conversion Eliminating support costs and the burden of maintaining legacy systems Showing a return on investment at 18-months Complying with HIPAA privacy and security regulations Deploying a virtualized solution into an existing infrastructure (can also be remotely-hosted) Keeping recurring costs down via an open source architecture Accessing or printing entire historical records with ease Providing a repository for both discrete data elements and scanned documents Relying on a single, dependable vendor, HHIT, for the extraction, and archival of data Parkview Health Lessons Learned It is important to vet out and choose an EMR archiving vendor that can manage the scope of the project. It is critical to consider archiving early on in the EHR implementation process as a built-in step, especially when acquiring/ merging with new practices. Archive sooner rather than later. If you wait to archive older systems, you risk losing subject matter experts. Plus, legacy systems are costly to maintain and vulnerable for technical failures. While there may not be a lot of glory in archiving, the data is important, legally necessary to keep and could save lives. For a printable version of this case study, click here. About Harmony Healthcare IT Since 2006, health IT analysts at Harmony Healthcare IT have extracted demographic, financial, clinical and administrative data from more than 500 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 solutions. Working with hundreds of systems, billions of records and terabytes of data, Harmony Healthcare IT provides clients with access to historical records. Simply. Contact Harmony Healthcare IT To learn more about how we can help with your healthcare organization’s legacy EMR or ERP system decommissioning, contact Harmony Healthcare IT .