Now in its 35th year, the theme for Health Information Professionals Week (HIP Week), April 15-19, 2024, is “Keeping Health Information Human.” The event recognizes the dedication and human touch HIPs bring to managing health information. There are three goals of HIP Week 2024: Raise awareness of the health information profession. Recognize contributions of health information teams. This includes medical and health service managers, medical record specialists, clinical data managers, data scientists, medical transcriptionists, and more. “Keep Health Information Human”. Health information professionals ensure the patients’ information is secure and that they receive high-quality care. HIP Week underscores the importance of maintaining patient privacy and delivering accurate health information. Our team at Harmony Healthcare IT is thankful for our partners in health information. We are pleased to do our part in supporting the HIP Week 2024 priority to keep health information human. This includes: Ensure patient information is secure. Recently, 81 percent of hospital CIOs we surveyed reported security vulnerability is a leading pain point driving legacy data management decisions. Legacy software ranks as a dangerous bad practice as outdated systems offer some of the easiest entry points for bad actors to gain access and cause mayhem within a medical environment. Decommissioning legacy data silos and archiving data to continue to meet compliance requirements is a major step forward toward an improved security posture. We also recommend employing a HIPAA Security Toolkit and adopting HITRUST, the most widely adopted security framework and certification. Maintain patient privacy. Privacy and security go hand in hand in healthcare. The HIPAA Privacy Rule has been active for more than 20 years and provides federal standards to safeguard the privacy of personal health information. There are additions to the rule, but the goal of protecting patient privacy remains at the core. A privacy benefit to archiving is that the legacy data is in one centralized location, which eases the burden of implementing and monitoring privacy controls and auditing. Further, there are several privacy features that support the Health Information Management (HIM) team built into HealthData Archiver™ including audit logs, break the glass functionality, role-based access and purge functionality. And, with Secure Record Delivery and Record Release, Harmony Healthcare IT can engage with patients on behalf of customers. With Secure Record Delivery, we can send archived historical patient data to a designated EHR endpoint such as a patient portal. Deliver accurate health information. Accurate patient identity management supports the entire organization and helps ensure the right patient record is attached to the right patient, at every turn. Consolidating legacy data to a central archive is a pivotal step to support patient identity management. Our solutions supports patient identity management efforts with Single Sign-On integration and MPI Management options. Harmony Healthcare IT’s HealthData Platform™ product and service offerings also support the three priorities of The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) 2024 Advocacy Agenda which include: Improve Individuals’ Health Journey Through Access to Information, Privacy, and Equity Ensure the Quality, Integrity, and Usability of Health Information Advance Healthcare Transformation Congratulations to everyone involved in HIP Week. We are inspired by our colleagues who continue to raise the bar for patient care. We will continue our part in advancing the data management solutions that HIP professionals worldwide count on. #HIPWEEK24