Application Retirement Matters For Patient Care
By Laury Verner, Director, Healthcare Strategy, Dell EMC Enterprise
Healthcare organizations face enormous challenges. From enhancing clinician productivity and lowering IT costs to coordinating care and improving patient outcomes, many are transitioning to a next-generation EHR. This is an important step forward but it is not enough.
Clinicians need access to historical records to get a comprehensive view of the patient. This information often resides on outdated legacy systems kept alive only for the patient information they contain, contributing to rising costs. In fact, 70 percent of the typical healthcare IT budget is for maintaining the legacy application portfolio, leaving little room for innovation. More troubling is the patient’s historical information may exist on disparate legacy systems limiting clinician access.
Instead of coping with fragmented patient data stored across legacy applications - each with its own user interface and security - imagine a scenario in which all this information was consolidated in one central location. Consider the cost savings, as well as the opportunities created for investment in data analytics, clinical decision support, and patient engagement.
In the continuing quest for high-quality, affordable, patient-centered care, an archiving strategy is essential. A central archive can consolidate and harmonize the legacy data, giving clinicians rapid access to it at the point of care.
In adopting an archiving strategy, you need to consider these three major issues.
Industry Consolidation
The healthcare industry is experiencing an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions. This can lead to economies of scale but is leading to application complexity and fragmentation in the short run. Hospitals and health systems are forced to maintain a large number of systems for managing data including patient demographics, history, allergies, immunizations, clinical notes, test results, radiological reports, advance directives, and so forth. Some of this information is discrete data, but more of it is in the form of unstructured content. Systems are currently in use accumulate massive amounts of data and documents. But once this information is no longer active, maintaining these systems becomes costly and access cumbersome for clinicians and Health Information Management (HIM).
Stringent Regulations
By law, patient data must be preserved – often for decades. This information must be immutable and cannot be altered or deleted. It must be auditable and available for auditors when requested.
Data Harmonization
The costs of software licenses, servers, storage, and ongoing maintenance and administration are soaring. These costs can be eliminated by decommissioning the legacy systems by consolidating data in a central archive. But the data needs to be logically harmonized in the archive so that, for example, clinical notes from different legacy systems use the same terminology and data format.
A Clinician-Friendly User Experience
The central archive requires a central web application that organizes historical patient data and presents it to the clinician in a simple, intuitive way. Such a web application can be invoked directly from the EHR system seamlessly and easily. The clinician can then find out, for example, what medications have been prescribed to that patient over the last 10 years or review the meningitis episode from five years ago.
Healthcare organizations must focus on decommissioning their redundant clinical legacy applications and systems and storing patient information in one centralized unified archive integrated into the EMR/EHR. This will give clinicians immediate access to all archived information. What is also needed is a level of integration enabling secure sharing of the complete patient record while taking into account patient privacy concerns.
Healthcare organizations should follow a five-step systematic process:
- Determine which systems contain patient data and which of these are candidates for decommissioning.
- Develop a strategy for archiving historical patient data.
- Consider HIM requirements and compliance with regulations for data preservation, security, and audit.
- Ensure clinicians have natural, intuitive access to the archived record, give them easy access from the EHR, and make sure the data and presentation are harmonized so they easily see the whole picture and make the right decisions for the patient.
- Undertake new and innovated programs to address the demands of the CEO and CIO and refocus the IT team on addressing these plans.
The real winners in this improved system are the clinicians and their patients. Clinicians will have an integrated, comprehensive view of the vast range of patient information such as medical history, medications, vital-sign data, operating and procedural notes, lab results, pathology reports, medical images cardiology tests, and more. And this information will be readily available at the point of care.
In hospitals across the U.S., clinical archiving solutions are helping accelerate care delivery and provide better care more cost effectively. Application Retirement really does matter for patient care. At the end of the day, it is about keeping patients as healthy as possible through delivering more efficient, high-quality care.