Nearly 500 health information technology organizations join forces this week to celebrate National Health IT Week. For the past decade, the event has grown to showcase how health information technology improves the quality of healthcare delivery, increases patient safety and decreases medical errors. We believe there are five main reasons to celebrate Health IT Week: Innovations – Utilizing information technology in healthcare is all about innovation. From the advent of the electronic health record (EHR), to sensors and wearable devices that help monitor a patient’s condition and provide analytics, there are numerous innovations that are reasons to celebrate! Check out a recent Wall Street Journal interview of Susannah Fox, Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services and her thoughts on creating a culture of innovation. Access – Information IS power. Having access to a complete patient narrative can help improve patient care and ultimately save lives. Our application, Health Data Archiver (HDA), is a lightweight, vendor and system neutral record storage solution that leads the industry in providing access to historical health information. By making this historical data readily available to caregivers, we’re helping to support fully-informed, proper treatment decisions. This is especially important in the cases of mental health and oncology, when having a comprehensive context of care history could make a world of difference. Clinicians who have access to HDA appreciate having a full patient narrative available with just a click of a button. HIM teams appreciate the smooth and seamless process for historical records management, release of information requests and that records are consolidated into one place for easy access. Check out some of our resources for more information. Standards – The evolving HIPAA requirements and technology advances lead to stricter standards and compliance issues for healthcare organizations. We see this as a good thing as pushing the envelope for greater healthcare outcomes through the use of information technology is what gets us really excited. We relish the opportunity to support our clients with solutions to support the long-term EHR storage and retrieval process. This also makes the legal teams happy as they need to be ready for eDiscovery and to meet compliance requirements around many turns. Check out our recent webinar about eDiscovery and healthcare record retention. Cost Savings – We love saving our clients money, especially when that also includes providing improved access to their complete library of legacy electronic health records. A solid, secure archive saves money due to decreased maintenance costs, less IT labor required to maintain old systems and the overall streamlining of the legacy IT portfolio and supporting infrastructure. Read our blog on five things to expect when archiving legacy systems. Improved Outcomes – Our mission is to preserve vital information so that lives may be improved. This mission, and the work all healthcare IT organizations complete during every week of the year, is the most important reason to celebrate National Health IT Week. It also motivates our team to continue to evolve our products and services to utilize technology solutions to help save lives. Check out a recent post by our CEO, Tom Liddell. So, join us in celebrating #NHITWeek. We’re advocates of health IT and we hope you are too. Health IT helps ensure that patients get appropriate, high-quality care when and where they need it, and, we like that. Contact Harmony Healthcare IT for more information about our data management services and Health Data Archiver.