Balancing Seamless HealthCare Access and Security
There are many eternal battles: good versus evil, the Force versus the Dark Side, and data access versus security. Front and center in the latter conflict is the healthcare industry. And many of the lessons learned in healthcare translate directly into other verticals.
The healthcare data landscape faces many challenges. We have larger hospital systems with aggressive acquisition strategies. Each health system and provider office that they acquire comes with its own set of IT applications and systems, specific data challenges, and ongoing data management strategies. Those data policies and infrastructural designs must be integrated and aligned with corporate strategy.
There are applications that manage clinical workflows, each with its own set of regulations on how long you can hold onto data. Those rules change as you expand across state lines. There are financial applications to manage the revenue cycle. Other applications like HR, payroll, accounts payable, general ledger, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) face similar regulatory hurdles. Each geographic zone needs an effective way to manage your legacy and current application inventory, remain compliant, and stay true to your healthcare mission. Otherwise, it is very easy to have redundancies, such as multiple financial systems performing essentially the same function, when one centralized financial application could do the same job far more efficiently. All of this can lead to fragmented data and accessibility issues. It can become challenging to track down specific data when it is spread across so many systems.
More recently, the industry has had to address the ONC Cures Act that ensures a patient’s right to their own medical records and promotes the electronic access, exchange, and use of health information. It mandates that health providers and IT developers remove any barriers that may prevent patients from being able to view their own health data. In addition, it calls for establishing a trusted exchange framework that supports interoperability among the many different health networks. ONC Cures includes penalties assessed for things like information locking and inability to produce clinical and financial data when needed. Clearly, there are many challenges involved in ONC Cures compliance, as so many applications can easily fall under the radar. Even those healthcare establishments attempting to be thorough in their compliance efforts could fall afoul of regulations due to data management errors and inconsistencies.
Active Archives Make Compliance Easier
Active archives help you extract more value from the data you are already holding onto. With an active archive, data is kept alive and accessible. In healthcare, for example, archiving assists in areas such as continuity of care, preventing duplicative testing, and adding value to research by making more data available.
Similarly, in the financial arena, you have legacy applications where you’re managing a large amount of accounts receivables, outstanding bills, and balances from patients who have been treated. Active archives effectively enable you to decommission those legacy applications, stop paying licensing and support fees, and yet still be able to work on those accounts from within that archive space.
An emerging use case for active archives, then, is making all that legacy data live, accessible, and usable by your enterprise even after that application has been decommissioned. It’s all about accomplishing a seamless and cost-effective strategy for storage, eliminating redundancies, and streamlining data management.
Realizing Value from Legacy Data
Active archives make it easier to unlock the value of legacy data, learn lessons from the past, and use that information to drive future insights. Even though data is old, there are always lessons to be learned.
In healthcare, legacy data helps researchers improve the ways they treat patients. It’s how they form evidence-based practices. A good example is an urgent care clinic that opened 10 years ago. If you are able to easily access historical data from an archive, you might notice that this clinic effectively decreased Emergency Department admissions by as much as 50% in that region. Data from several years ago, therefore, can still be used to better the organization and discover future efficiencies. Healthcare and all other industries need an effective legacy data management program, and that is best achieved through an active archive.
You can find out more about emerging use cases for active archives by listening to the recordings of the 2023 Active Archive Virtual Conference
