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Technology systems shouldn’t get in the way of your top priority—providing quality care. Clinicians often require instant access to an historical patient chart at point of care and don’t have the luxury of time to wait for the HIM team to pull it. Using HealthData Archiver®, a long-term record storage platform, providers can access complete patient medical history—within the context of the go-forward EMR—at the touch of a button. The Single Sign-On EMR integration allows medical staff to make informed decisions based on the complete clinical narrative.
While real time access to complete patient medical records is critical, so too is ease of use. Whether you are a physician, nurse, or CMIO, Harmony Healthcare IT’s HealthData Archiver® platform streamlines patient record analysis by presenting summarized, yet holistic, views of relevant patient history in an intuitive, easy to use interface. Thoughtful features such as Single Sign-On keep the clinician and patient at the forefront.
“Getting one important piece of information from the legacy record can dramatically change how we care for a patient in the here and now.”
So, as an emergency physician, we need to take care of every patient who comes in and part of taking care of them is looking up their old records and finding out their medical history. So, sometimes those patients who come in aren’t really able to provide us with their medical history. And there are a number of reasons for that. They could be unconscious, they could have severe difficulty breathing, they could have difficulty speaking, like in a stroke type situation, they could just have a cognitive deficit. They don’t have good health care literacy or they have dementia or they have a developmental delay. So, they’re not able to be the source of information. So, access to records are important. And if information is not in the current EHR looking back into legacy data can be really critical. So, a good example of that is somebody who comes in with severe shortness of breath. So obviously, they’re struggling to breathe and sometimes they have oxygen mask on or a type of ventilation assistance device. So, they can’t really talk to us and let’s say we do an x-ray and we see abnormal x-ray findings. Well, sometimes the x-ray findings are not conclusive. It could be pneumonia, it could be COVID-19, it could be heart failure or fluid on the lungs. And that one x-ray doesn’t tell the whole picture. What really would help us in that situation is access to something like an echocardiogram. So, that’s a ultrasound of the heart. And people who have heart disease get those periodically, maybe every six months every year. And having access to that one piece of information can dramatically help us care for that patient in the here and now. So, if we can get into the legacy data and see what that echocardiogram showed that would help us differentiate between a heart failure, abnormal chest x-ray and a pneumonia or COVID-19, abnormal chest x-ray. And obviously, the treatment of those two conditions is very different. I think that’s a great example of how just getting one important piece of information from the legacy record dramatically changes how we care for a patient in the here and now.
A simple yet extremely helpful capability, Single Sign On eliminates the need for manual logons into archived, historical medical records by seamlessly connecting clinicians from an active EHR, in-context, to the patient’s historical medical record. This feature saves valuable time and is typically available for most major EMR brands (i.e., Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, Athena) via standards such as Oauth/OpenID, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0) and others.
This HealthData Archiver® feature aggregates a single patient’s encounter data across multiple legacy data sources to a single screen. This view provides added convenience and access to a comprehensive clinical narrative (i.e., lab results, flow sheets, growth charts or other clinical data) to better inform treatment decisions at the point of care.
When an archive stores data discretely, it opens up to the time-saving feature of filtering and sorting. Not only can data like medications or lab values be readily discovered and reviewed, but they can also be sorted in ascending, descending, alpha or numeric order.
With the attachment of any ODBC tool to HealthData Archiver®, custom reports may be generated so that data mining and analytics may be performed. Legacy data may be exported from HealthData Archiver® and shared to population health management applications, data warehouses, APIs, dashboard/visualization tools (i.e., Qlik, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, SAP Business Objects, SYTRUE, etc.), HIEs, research teams, and more.
With its open and scalable architecture, HealthData Archiver® is built to accommodate and store data from any legacy system, in any format. Data that is discrete in the source system will be archived as discrete data while unstructured data will be archived as unstructured. Typical file formats in which discrete data is delivered are CDA, CCDA, CCD, CCR, CSV, XML, HL7, Flat File or FHIR. The accommodation of data into HealthData Archiver® serves as an alternative to the costly and complex “traditional data conversion” from a source system to a destination system that requires data to be transformed to fit (not always so ideally) into the destination database structure.
A legacy data solution that fits into an efficient clinical workflow for physicians and medical scribes.
Dr. Mark Kricheff, Emergency Physician and Clinical Informaticist, covers examples of how legacy data and historical records are used in treating patients in the ER.
Quick video demonstration of single sign-on feature – see it for yourself.