Harmony Healthcare IT is pleased to help spread awareness of National Health Center Week (August 4-10, 2019), the annual celebration of the importance of community health centers. First opening in 1965, these valuable community-based healthcare centers now serve 28 million patients nationwide. Community health centers serve on the front lines of national public health challenges – whether caring for veterans, providing opioid treatment, or responding to natural disasters. With nearly half of health centers located in rural communities, they are also a lifeline in remote and underserved communities where the nearest doctor or hospital can be as far as 50 miles or more away. These health centers help increase access to crucial primary care by reducing barriers such as cost, lack of insurance, distance, and language for their patients. In doing so, health centers provide substantial benefits to the country and its health care system including: Delivering a broad array of primary and preventive care services, including screening, diagnosis and management of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, asthma, heart and lung disease, depression, cancer and HIV/AIDS Reducing unnecessary hospitalizations and unnecessary visits to the emergency room Treating patients for a fraction of the average cost of one emergency room visit Serving more than one in six Medicaid beneficiaries for less than 2% of the national Medicaid budget Lowering the cost of children’s primary care by approximately 35% Serving over 355,000 veterans throughout the country Saving American taxpayers $24 billion a year in health care costs by preventing and managing chronic diseases Accessible Archive Provides Complete Patient Narrative and Cost Savings Are you part of a community health center team that is focused on record retention requirements and lifecycle data management? One of the easiest steps forward in cost savings and technology leadership for a community health center is to create a solid long-term plan for legacy EHR and/or ERP systems. Often, legacy systems are left operating in read-only format, creating technical vulnerability and running up unnecessary charges. It is important to comply with record retention regulations. Doing so requires a HIPAA-compliant medical data storage solution that can secure records for the long-term — typically anywhere from seven to 25+ years based on state mandate. That’s a long time to keep a legacy billing, human resources or EMR system up and running in tandem with a new system – especially if there happens to be more than one. To avoid risk and to be compliant with record retention mandates, legacy system decommissioning and data archival are important components of any system replacement. Affordable, secure solutions exist for community health centers to extract data from a retired application and migrate it into an electronic archive. This transition of PHI from a full production system into a more static, HIPAA-compliant, browser-based database allows the center to: Stop paying software maintenance to the legacy vendor Remove the aging server from its technical infrastructure Ensure that historical records are consolidated and quickly accessible Comply with record retention regulations We can help your community health center create a systemized plan to archive the legacy EHR or ERP that exists in numerous data silos across your organization. Let’s connect. About National Health Center Week This year’s NHCW 2019 will highlight how health centers are at the forefront of a nationwide shift in addressing environmental and social factors as an integral part of primary care, reaching beyond the walls of conventional medicine to address the factors that may cause sickness, such as lack of nutrition, mental illness, homelessness and substance use disorders. Each day of NHCW 2019 is dedicated to a particular focus area. To learn more and view a listing of events please visit: www.healthcenterweek.org.