What We Do
Services
Data Management
Tech rationalization consultation on the who, what, when and how of data management
For large healthcare organizations in the US and Canada, it’s not uncommon to find 30-40 legacy systems. These acute, ambulatory, clinical, financial or business systems deliver little production value, yet account for substantial maintenance costs.
It’s time to make data available, reportable, researchable, and interoperable. It’s time to mobilize planning to make medical records available to consumers as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act.
Our rationalization consulting services help identify options that will:
That accessibility may come in the form of data extraction, migration, conversion, or retention initiatives—all prioritized, synthesized and mapped into a full legacy data management strategy deliverable.
A team of our rationalization consultants will work with your IT, HIM, Revenue Cycle, Clinical, HR and Regulatory stakeholders to gather the information necessary and aggregate a set of findings and cross-departmental user specifications. Any recommended options will ensure that protected health, employee and business records meet regulatory compliance, research and reporting requirements defined by your regulatory compliance team.
Our team has broad and deep experience with more than 550 unique clinical, financial and administrative software brands. We often are called on to step in when other projects have stalled or reached a challenge that requires technical acumen and agility that only comes from our experience.
Healthcare organizations need a strategy to evaluate, prioritize and optimize the applications within their enterprise. This includes applications such as electronic health records (EHR), billing and payment systems and the infrastructure needed to support the systems. Application rationalization involves analyzing all the applications to determine the optimal mix of production systems and those that can be decommissioned, with any data that needs to be maintained saved in an archive or other storage option that meets the organization’s guidelines for record retention, access and release.
In healthcare, having the right mix of applications in production is important from an efficiency, cost and security standpoint. Leaving out-of-production systems up and running in the application portfolio can create challenges for efficiently accessing the data for users and patients as well as pose threats in keeping the systems safe from cybersecurity threats which are prevalent among legacy software.
Initially, a data governance team often is defined to provide oversight and craft key decisions to help make informed decisions about the application landscape. The governance goals are to eliminate inefficiencies, reduce costs, improve security, and streamline operations. The application rationalization strategy must meet the organization’s compliance requirements for all protected health, employee, and business records. The first step to inform the rationalization strategy is to gather necessary information from cross-departmental users such as IT, HIM, Revenue Cycle, Clinical, HR and Regulatory. Once the key information is collected and the compliance strategy reviewed, there can be a review of the total cost of ownership (hardware, software, maintenance, and labor). At that point there can be a data management strategy and timeline can be developed that prioritizes the plans for each application (including which should be decommissioned and legacy data migrated to an archive) as well as a continuous plan for ongoing application rationalization efforts.