Did you know that a couple of years back (2019) the Supreme Court issued a ruling reinforcing the statute of limitations for medical records retention lawsuits? Medicare and Medicaid providers now recommend keeping records for at least 10 years to avoid potential liability or claims. The potential loss is up to $50,000 per violation. In addition to the legal implications of not maintaining medical records, obtaining quick and secure access to old records is essential for clinical and business operations.
Medical data archiving is a complex topic but offers many benefits for the organization that embraces it as standard practice. The key to navigating the data archiving process is not only the successful completion of individual archiving projects with excellent customer service and responsiveness, but also the core competencies, experience, and expertise to assist you as a healthcare IT organization. The right mix of related technologies plays a role in ensuring the success of the initiative in terms of quality, timeliness, and cost. Triyam, with 13 years of experience–and literally thousands of satisfied customers–is well-positioned to do just that. For more information or a demo email us at info@triyam.com or call (855) 663-2684.
- What is medical data archiving?
- What is VNA (Vendor Neutral Archiving Solutions)?
- What are the types of archiving for a medical record?
- What is the purpose of archiving a patient’s medical data?
- What are the benefits of medical data archiving?
What is medical data archiving?
A medical data archive houses the underlying information from the particular system or systems in a unified, centralized, and easy-to-use archiving application, without relying on the original system’s existence. The purpose of medical data archival is to ensure that data maintenance will satisfy organizational and regulatory requirements for historical data availability, and that those legal and regulatory requirements for data archiving and retention of data are met. Triyam has extensive experience in delivering fast, secure, and compliant access to legacy patient data.
Historical Data Management serves multiple business purposes. It defines how data history is collected and tracked, and how data is managed during later stages of its lifecycle, including:
- Retaining and archiving data/records
- Reducing data storage size to improve performance in production
- Restoring a data state at a specific point in time
- Satisfying internal and external retention requirements
Basically, the minimum requirement for archiving medical data is to have a system that still needs the data for compliance or other purposes, but is no longer used as an application in production. It is very helpful to know what data should be stored in what format and what the typical access or usage patterns are. Additionally, it’s important to know where and how the central archive can be set up either On-Premises or Software as a Service (SAAS).
What is VNA (Vendor Neutral Archiving Solutions)?
A Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) is a technology that stores medical images in a standard format and interface, making them accessible to medical professionals regardless of the proprietary system that created them. It is a data management solution that provides clinicians and physicians with a database for storing, archiving, and accessing all medical images (both DICOM and non-DICOM images).
Triyam’s vendor-neutral solution ‘Fovea’ – a powerful EHR, EMR, and ERP archiving solution – stores historical patient data in a vendor-neutral format. Providers can search for a patient and view or download historical medical data. Continuity of care for the patients is ensured. The release of Information is made easy with just a few clicks.
What a vendor-neutral archive is used for – VNAs enable healthcare organizations to consolidate, standardize, and archive images and data from different picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) into a single, easily accessible, and interoperable repository.
Major VNA features include the following:
- A dual-site configuration, ideally across 2 information centers, to shield against failures in one system
- An intuitive interface
- Support for external information, like DICOM, non-DICOM hardware, and universal viewers
- The ability to pass through accidental information deletion
- Logging and security choices that IT will simply manage
What are the types of archiving for a medical record?
There are several types of data archiving solutions available on the market. Differences include whether data from multiple systems can be archived together consistently or processed independently, whether it is an on-premises solution or some form of SaaS or cloud hosting, whether the client software is a web-based or native application, and whether It includes how fit for medical care. Records from several different systems are combined. Healthcare IT organizations must carefully select vendors and solutions that meet their needs in this regard.
What is the purpose of archiving a patient’s medical data?
Archiving records that are not in an active EMR is a practical way to achieve interoperability for several reasons. Consider a large healthcare system with multiple hospitals with different departmental EMRs. Accessing comprehensive information from this multitude of disparate systems is a major challenge for physicians and patients. This is inefficient, disorganized, costly, and can expose healthcare systems to the risk of security breaches as multiple applications and their infrastructure deteriorate over time. Centralize EHI from disparate legacy systems into one active Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant repository to protect, harmonize and access data for those who need it. This offers workflows for clinicians and the health information management (HIM) team, as well as interoperability with other systems and tools in the organization’s ecosystem.
Data archiving allows healthcare providers to preserve patient records for years, as required by state and federal law. These FAQs address storage types, offloads, and other issues. Healthcare organizations create terabytes of data each year in the form of patient records, lab results, and medical images. Clinical archives reduce maintenance costs for legacy systems and reduce ongoing compliance with HIPAA, PHI, and other regulatory requirements while enabling easier access to data through legacy applications to better serve patients. Provides a complete view.
By moving legacy data to a standard, secure archive:
- Clinicians will simply access historical patient records in one place for a comprehensive read of patient records, allowing improved care.
- Health information management workers will respond in a timely manner to unleash knowledge requests, audits, and proceeding events.
- IT departments can recoup valuable budgets to realize savings or direct resources to strategic initiatives.
What are the benefits of medical data archiving?
- Healthcare IT organizations will leverage vendor-neutral archiving to decrease on-premise footprint, decrease support prices, resolve security exceptions and conserve vital information for compliance and coverage functions.
- The costs of Release of Information activities can be greatly reduced, significantly once combined with archive level enterprise wide patient deduplication.
- At an additional advanced level, associate enterprise-wide vendor-neutral archive, once notably combined with archiving current production systems in real-time, may also be used to change business intelligence, machine learning, data processing, third-tier offsite true disaster recovery, consolidated and simplified unharness of data, and to support knowledge migrations to new systems wherever knowledge is natively consumed via the HL7 or FIHR protocols.
- Large scale data analysis, machine learning, the centralized release of information, as well as making the inevitable next application migration much more worry-free and seamless.
- Broad staff understanding of the business purposes for capturing and retaining historical data and associated requirements
- Better results in minimizing duplicate patient records
- Compliance with records retention regulations
- A consistent set of archiving criteria to increase data store performance
- Ability to restore a data state at a specific point in time
- It provides greater clinical efficiency and coordination across the continuum of care through access to data anytime, anywhere.
- On-demand access to all archived patient records, documents, and images through one system, including integration with EPIC, gives clinicians a complete view of patient history, diagnosis, and treatment when and where they are most needed at the point of care.
- System performance also is achieved through periodic archiving of inactive data to reduce the load placed on current production systems.