In a recent study of electronic health record (EHR) system buyers, 2015 marked the first time the number of clinicians looking to replace an existing EMR outnumbered the number of clinicians looking to purchase an EHR for the first time. Merger and acquisition is often a leading cause of system replacement due to the cost and liability of running two systems. Further, the number of buyers replacing existing EHR software has increased 59 percent since 2014—implying that many EHR products are failing to meet physicians’ needs. Even market leading EMR vendors like Allscripts are being replaced. With record first quarter bookings of $252 million, it’s no secret that Allscripts is a market leader. But, many of the nearly 180,000 physicians, 45,000 physician offices and 2,500 hospitals that utilize Allscripts products are finding that there are times when these systems get replaced, requiring EMR conversion and migration. One such example is Torrance Health Association, a Management Service Organization (MSO) that provides practice management and administrative support services for 100 physician group practices with more than 350 support staff across 22 locations in southern California. Torrance Health Association implemented a new EMR that replaced five Allscripts Misys systems as well as one Practice Partners system from McKesson. Patient data from the six legacy systems was archived to consolidate the historical data store, making each data source easily accessible to users within the MSO. “The entire archiving process was convenient and easy,” says Barry Sheppard, Senior Director of Information Systems at Torrance Health Association, in a recent case study of the project. “[The decommissioning of legacy systems and archival of patient data] positions us well for future growth as more practices join the network and we standardize on a go forward EHR system.” Should your healthcare delivery system have an existing EMR that has been or is slated to be replaced for one reason or another, investigate patient data archiving as an alternative to a costly and complex data conversion. Contact the data experts at Harmony Healthcare IT, the makers of Health Data Archiver, to learn more about a streamlined methodology for securing patient data from any EMR or ERP system into an easy-to-access archive for compliance with state record retention mandates.