With the recent sale of its EHR technology business to Allscripts, McKesson seems to be focusing on its core pharmacy and lab system businesses. The sale to Allscripts includes McKesson’s Enterprise Information Solutions (EIS) portfolio of Paragon (EHR); STAR and HealthQuest (revenue cycle solutions); Lab Analytics and Blood Bank; and OneContent (content management solutions). The $185 million-dollar sale boosts Allscripts into a strong third place in the EHR market of more than 1,000 vendors and the combination of Paragon and Allscripts Sunrise, hospitals will double the company’s EHR hospital client count in the United States. Some industry analysts also see Allscripts as a more viable international EHR option as their overall product costs are lower than some of the solutions from the other large competitors. Read more here. The EHR market includes 1,000+ vendors. The EHR market leaders and 2016 revenues include: Cerner – 4.8 billion Epic (privately held with 2016 reported revenue of 1.7 billion) Allscripts – 1.6 billion Meditech – 462 million What do all the changes in the EHR market mean for customers? Consolidation, products sunsetting and acquisitions all spark business case scenarios for a robust data management strategy. In a recent report, 39 percent of current McKesson Paragon customers surveyed plan to find a new vendor. For a summary of the KLAS Research survey of current McKesson Paragon EHR customers from 38 organizations, click here. Archiving is a steady solution in a turbulent EMR market Should any combination of your EMR products be acquired or sunset over time, data archiving is always an alternative to the more costly and complex EMR data conversion. A well-planned legacy data management strategy alleviates future IT costs, risks and burdens as platforms come and go. Long-term medical data storage vendors who know the EMR market inside and out offer secure solutions that ensure data integrity and meet HIPAA and state medical record retention requirements. When you look at the real cost of maintaining multiple legacy systems, including licensing, maintenance and support as well as the associated internal IT labor burden, the ongoing management of outdated systems becomes difficult to justify. Plus, the risk exists that the old systems may become obsolete and non-supported. Keeping the organization’s long term vision in mind, there is business value and strategic benefits to adopting an EMR archive to keep legacy data intact in a searchable, manageable and HIPAA-compliant format. Is it time to shore up disparate data silos in your organization? We can help.