As you move data from one system to another (e.g., to consolidate data centers, leverage a better electronic health record (EHR), or retire an obsolete server), one of the critical decisions your team must make is how to maintain access to older, historical information (sometimes called “cold data”) that’s critical for patient care and business continuity. Errors and omissions during the complex migration process can have dire consequences.
Fortunately, data archiving—the process of transferring cold data to less expensive, secondary storage for safe patient care and compliance and regulatory purposes—can help streamline your data migration efforts, enabling you to save money, promote data integrity, and minimize workflow disruptions. Here’s how.
Strategic archivers understand the importance of having a structured approach to data archiving, which drastically reduces the volume of data needed to migrate to a new system while simultaneously providing end users with efficient and uninterrupted access to cold data. With an archiving plan, you reduce the likelihood of unnecessary headaches during these transitions—your data resides safely in a storage system or cloud-based archival solution where users can access it when they need to. This is helpful for current as well as future data migration projects. In fact, data migration often becomes more manageable and cost effective when you strategically commit to ongoing data archiving. A lower volume of data lessens the overall complexity of the migration process that often equates to a faster transition to the new system.
With healthcare data archiving, you preserve the integrity of the data by mitigating the risk of data loss or corruption inherent in the migration process. Archiving cold data rather than migrating it leads to overall enhanced data quality. One caveat? Data quality checks and validations are important before, during, and after the data archiving process to ensure data integrity.
New systems perform optimally when end users have all the information they need at their fingertips. That’s where data archiving can help. With healthcare data archiving, your end users no longer need to access legacy systems in addition to the new system to gain a clear picture of the data in its totality. Archiving solutions can integrate directly with the new system to provide seamless access, drive maximum productivity and efficiency, and support ideal system performance in your organization. This heightened performance, in turn, promotes a positive return on investment, enhances end-user satisfaction, and may improve patient care quality as well.
Data archiving provides much-needed reassurance that you’ll meet regulatory obligations regarding data retention and patient privacy even while pursuing one or more complex data migration projects. You won’t need to worry about not having access to historical data, not being able to provide patients with timely access to their information, or accidentally destroying data prematurely. In addition, healthcare data archival solutions compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) safeguard your organization against potential legal, compliance, and security issues associated with data loss or unauthorized access that can have costly reputational and financial implications.
Archiving data before beginning a data migration project significantly reduces overall migration costs because your migration efforts only target mission-critical data—not all your data. This means there’s far less data to “clean,” or put into the format required for the new system. Cleaning the data may also require reorganizing folder structures, renaming files, extracting certain data points, and digitizing information. Even with automation, manual human review is needed during the data cleansing process. On the other hand, only migrating what you need allows you to focus on reducing duplicate records and providing direct access to organized records in the new system—all while older, historical data remains intact. Even after the data migration project is complete, continuing to archive older, historical data helps you reduce storage costs and data backups necessary to accommodate data growth in the new environment.
Unimpeded access to archived data minimizes the risk of medical errors and adverse events because it provides clinicians with complete information about past diagnoses and treatment. This information is often critical to making informed decisions, and it may even save lives. Healthcare data archiving solutions enable your teams to retrieve treatment, medication, and prognosis information even during large data migration projects, thereby enhancing patient safety and quality of care.
While archiving often serves as a beneficial component of data migration projects, there’s another aspect of the process it can sometimes be confused with. Before moving data, it’s helpful to consider compatibility and whether data conversion may be necessary.
What is data conversion? It’s a unique aspect of data migration that may be necessary for transferring data from one system or platform to another. Conversion ensures the data has the right format, structure, and standard necessary for the new system. It’s vital to both data integrity and accessibility and should be discussed in the early planning stages of any new project. Olah has partnered with LGI for data conversion.
Healthcare data archival will continue to play a pivotal role in data migration, ensuring the preservation, accessibility, and integrity of historical data. As healthcare organizations migrate to new EHRs and other novel systems, strategic data archiving will be paramount importance. Without it, stakeholders may not have access to historical data necessary to derive accurate insights and patient care decisions.
Prioritizing data archival ensures organizations can ultimately leverage all—not just some—of their data effectively.
See Olah’s simple, fast, and complete solution to data archiving in action.