Clinician Access to Legacy Medical Records Key for Millions Admitted to ICUs

Summary

For the five million U.S. patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) annually, access to the complete medical record by their care team is critical. And, considering that more than half the counties in America lack intensive care beds, patients are often further from home and their primary care physician, making record sharing even more challenging.

Intensive-care-unit-graphic

Short story: In the ICU, the electronic health record (EHR) has an opportunity to be a hero.

EHRs in the intensive care unit now shoulder a lot of responsibility for providing A/V technology, predictive analysis, data visualization, and advanced reporting capabilities. In many health systems, this technology-driven optimization allows an intensivist to be at the wheel to remotely monitor sometimes hundreds of ICU beds to further support the onsite medical team.

As the ICU monitoring systems age and providers roll out new go-forward EHRs, there are important decisions to be made about how to maintain compliance with record retention guidelines from federal, state and even condition-specific rules.

When there’s a monitoring system or other EHR system replacement, data conversion and active archiving should be considerations with regard to legacy data management.

HealthData Archiver®, a cloud-based clinical data storage solution, delivers on clinical record retention and compliance in a secure and searchable format. Taking a step forward with a new EHR should include a strategy for the legacy ICU monitoring data that legally must be retained. With an active archive onboard, clinicians literally can access historical patient records with a single sign-on from their active EHR and see options for contextual search as well as sort and filter features to quickly scan multiple data points.

This is important because – in an ICU – minutes matter.

The mission at Harmony Healthcare IT is to preserve vital information that improves lives with its products: and HealthData Locker™ – all which deliver PHI protection, cost-savings, and information access. They also fortify defenses against cyberattack by providing a secure storage place for otherwise disparate silos of legacy data. Ranked #1 in the 2020 Best in KLAS Report for Data Archiving, the Harmony Healthcare IT team has worked with more than 500 software brands utilized in hospitals and clinics, archiving billions of records and storing petabytes of data. Harmony Healthcare IT migrates and archives records across the care continuum – for hospitals, health systems, pharmacies, clinics, labs, blood banks, home health care, long-term care, and more.

Ready for a demo on how an active archive can support your lifecycle data management goals?

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Jun 16 2021

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