“Healthcare Legacy Data Management, an Overview of Data Archiving and System Decommissioning with Rick Adams” is the title of a new executive interview series published by Harmony Healthcare IT. In the interview, Rick Adams, the Managing Partner of Harmony Healthcare IT, talks about many of the issues that IT leaders are faced with in developing a legacy data management strategy. As Rick notes in the interview, legacy data management and data archiving have undergone a technical evolution from extracting patient and billing data from older financial systems to now extracting clinical information from EHR systems. For example, when a hospital acquires a physician practice, it’s very likely that the physician practice already has an EHR system. In fact, The Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a study which found that “In 2011, 54% of physicians had adopted an electronic health record (EHR) system.” In the interview, Rick describes this challenge as follows, “Today, IT leaders are facing data conversion challenges from clinical and electronic health record (EHR) system replacements. This clinical data is all stored in a digital format but not all of it is stored discretely or with the same logic. The challenge, then, is in trying to convert or map this data from one EHR infrastructure to another so that providers are able to access full data integrity at the point of care when critical clinical decision making is required.” Rick notes that in contrast to attempting to convert data from a legacy system, “data archiving is the process of taking data from a legacy system and normalizing it in a relational database structure. A user interface or presentation layer is then applied so the data is searchable as discrete elements and viewed in a format that is representative of how the data was stored in the former application. This process allows for full data integrity at a reasonable price point.” For more information on Harmony Healthcare IT’s Health Data Archiver product, visit the product website at www.healthdataarchiver.com. To download a copy of the executive interview with Rick Adams, go to http://www.healthdataarchiver.com/legacydata/