When there is a decision to upgrade or replace an electronic health record (EHR), like athenahealth® decisions must be made about what to do with legacy data that still needs to be retained to meet compliance and legal requirements.
athenahealth® is one of the most popular cloud-based EHR and practice management (PM) providers for medical groups and ambulatory practices. It consists of several products including: athenaIDX (revenue cycle management RCM and practice management), athenaClinicals (EHR), athenaCommunicator (patient engagement, care coordination), Epocrates (embedded in the EHR to provide clinical decision support), athenahealth Population Health (Helps organizations analyze data, identify trends and improve community health) and athenaOne (fully integrated cloud-based suite of solutions that includes EHR system, practice management and care coordination).
When healthcare providers decide it’s time to dig in or move away from an EHR like athenahealth, Harmony Healthcare IT can provide migration and legacy data management services.
The first step prior to moving any athenahealth data is to create or update a legacy data management strategy. This plan should map out the lifecycle for clinical, financial, and operational data.
There can be 30-40+ legacy systems that need to be reviewed and prioritized for conversion to a new EHR or migrated to an archive. A best practice is to inventory the legacy systems.
Ensure the vendor has the right experience to meet your lifecycle data management needs.
Focused exclusively on healthcare, Harmony Healthcare IT is an award-winning data management firm with a proven ability to extract, migrate and archive data with 100% integrity.
HealthData Archiver® is vendor neutral and supports ease of product integration across more than 550 clinical, financial, and business software brands including athenahealth.
The Harmony Healthcare IT team can guide your organization through a straightforward process to identify the scope for the archive to ensure the result meets the intended purpose and goals. Our deep experience with athenahealth provides upfront system-specific information that provides a positive project implementation experience. The final archive
Through an application programming interface (API), the active archive, HealthData Archiver® can be accessed via Single Sign-On from within an athenahealth electronic health record (EHR). Additionally, a patient merge interface is available through an HL7 interface to handle real-time patient merge (link) and unmerge (unlink) requests from the active EHR platform. Patient records can also be transmitted to the go-forward EHR from HealthData Archiver which allows for the record to be published in the EHR and patient portal.
Full integration ensures secure exchange and accessibility of data within the entire healthcare ecosystem. With data discretely archived within HealthData Archiver, it can be enabled for FHIR, C-CDA, HL7, XML, Direct, or other standards-based protocols for a variety of use cases:
Seamlessly authenticate, in patient-context, from athenahealth to HealthData Archiver®. Oauth/OpenID, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0) and other standards are supported.
The finalized rules of the 21st Century Cures Act require extensive patient access to electronic medical records without charge by the healthcare provider in the format chosen.
Link historical patient records to the master patient index (MPI). This greatly reduces manual or fuzzy logic patient matching, thereby increasing accuracy and successfully setting patient information up for future interoperability or integration projects.
After creating a master record with historical person identification from multiple big data sources that were consolidated into HealthData Archiver, use criteria to match the historical person ID to the go-forward EHR, using a form of HL7 to merge (link) and unmerge (unlink) records as necessary.
Ensures that archived data within HealthData Archiver is monitored for unusual activity and compliance through an integrated third-party monitoring platform. Capture audit activity from login to logout and rest assured that the privacy and security of protected health information is covered.
Pre-define required reports as part of the data storage planning process. Connect an ODBC/JDBC reporting, analytics, or business intelligence tool of choice (e.g., Crystal Reports®, Qlik®, Tableau®, SAP®), to make data dictionary and schema available to technical resources who then self-serve on demand.
Export legacy data from HealthData Archiver and share it to population health management applications, data warehouses, APIs, dashboard/visualization tools, HIEs, research teams, and more.
Extraction options – Historically, athenahealth has only offered a limited extraction export that included a few basic items such as appointments, insurance, transactions and patient documents (clinical chart and continuity of care documents (CCD)). This limited extraction set could support a legal record release, but would not be ideal for clinical use. Recently, athenahealth has added an expanded export option that includes 25-30 individual sets of information that allows the user to sort at a more granular level such as medications or vitals instead of scrolling through lengthy PDF records as previously provided through the clinical chart.
Our team is equipped to work with either export and deliver an archive that supports the client’s needs and goals. We are equipped to work with the PM or EHR systems and can create a separate or combined archive. This is possible because HealthData Archiver® is a flexible relational database that provides numerous filterable and reporting capabilities.
Unique EOB reports – The explanation of benefits (EOB) reports available to export from athenahealth are not patient–centric. This means that the reports may include transaction information from multiple patients. It is important to plan for this unique data management situation in the design of the archive.
Our team at Harmony Healthcare IT brings comprehensive data management experience to the table.
We have worked with more than 550 unique software brands and know athenahealth inside and out.
We can help your team meet its data management goals.
Data Harmonization Achieved by Large Academic Medical Center
Unique State Retention Laws and M&A Growth Drive Archiving Strategy
Single Sign-On to Archive Simplifies Clinical Workflows and Access to Full Medical Record
Yes, data can be migrated from athenahealth® to Epic. While migration simply refers to the movement of data from one system to another, there may need to be a conversion step to ensure the data is moved (migrated) and formatted to work with the new EHR. A full conversion to Epic can be complex and expensive. As such, usually only a subset of key clinical data from one to three years is typically migrated to Epic. In most cases, when there is a decision to change or upgrade EHRs, it makes sense to hold a strategic discussion to review the current inventory of source systems and determine the best option for moving forward with a plan for the current data that includes migration, conversion, and migration to storage. There are many benefits to including an open relational archive like HealthData Archiver® in the long-term data management plan. There are cost, security and accessibility benefits to streamlining the data in the go-forward EHR and utilizing the archive with a Single Sign-On capability to keep the remaining date accessible from the go-forward EHR and compliant with record retention requirements.
athenahealth® is an electronic health record (EHR). This means it has broader capabilities than an electronic medical record (EMR), which is most likely used within a medical clinic or physician’s office. EHRs are better equipped to support the record sharing (aka: interoperability) needed across the health care continuum of providers, labs, specialists, payers, and patients.
Let’s connect. We can walk through your unique needs and ensure you are set for the future.