Posts Tagged: legacy systems

5 Reasons to Say Goodbye to Your Legacy System

Posted October 20, 2020 by Beth Osborne & filed under Healthcare, Pharmacy.

Having a legacy system still running is not unlike having a chain around your ankle. It’s not practical, efficient, or cost-effective. In other words, it’s weighing your organization down. When you moved to a new health information system, you probably didn’t want to convert everything. So, you kept your legacy systems to ensure access to old medical records and files.

Many healthcare organizations do this because they think it’s the easiest path, and they know they need to adhere to medical record retention requirements. However, you probably know by now that it’s expensive, risky, and incompatible with clinical workflows.

If you need reasons to say goodbye to your legacy system, we’ve got five of them!

Reason One: Your Patient Data Could Be at Risk

You have to maintain software systems and install new updates. These new versions offer more security and resolve bugs or vulnerabilities. Your legacy system, especially if it’s offline or no longer supported, isn’t receiving these crucial updates. That makes it easier for hackers to penetrate your PHI (protected healthcare information) and cause a breach or infect the network with malware.

In either situation, you face reputational harm, noncompliance, and huge financial losses. Don’t let your legacy system become a way in for hackers.

Reason Two: You’ll Save Money

Your IT budget is already stretched to its limits, and keeping a legacy system up isn’t helping. You likely are still paying maintenance, hosting, and other fees. If you archive your data to a central hub, you will likely reduce overall IT costs, and research in the field supports this notion. It’s a smart cost-control measure that enables you to be free of the legacy platform for good.

Reason Three: A Legacy System Isn’t Conducive to Clinical Workflows

In every healthcare organization, clinicians have workflows that correspond with how they use technology. Legacy systems derail these workflows and cause inefficiencies. This occurs most often with an on-prem server. Because it’s not cloud-based, you must physically be where that server is to find the records you need. It threatens productivity and prevents streamlining.

Reason Four: Improve Accessibility

As noted, accessing a legacy platform can be complex, and those that need it may not have it. This causes lots of confusion and creating workarounds. The simplicity of a cloud-based archiving system is that it’s accessible from any browser with the right permissions. The data you need from the legacy software could be urgent in response to patient care, audits, or subpoenas. You don’t have time to waste, and that’s what will happen if you can’t quickly obtain what you need from the legacy system.

Reason Five: You Could Suffer Downtime

Downtime is a “scary” word in the world of IT. When systems are down, everything halts because you’re so dependent on technology. An older system isn’t going to have as much reliability and consistency as a modern one, so you are very likely to encounter downtime. Such an incident could cause lots of issues around care and compliance.

Choosing to archive with a secure and long history of continuous uptime will provide your IT team with more confidence. The alternative with your legacy system is when not if it will go down.

Say Goodbye to Your Legacy System Today

Don’t let legacy systems hold you back any longer. Break free from the costs and risks of keeping the old system running. Take the path to archiving to ensure accessibility, compliance, and security. See how easy and affordable it is by exploring our archiving platform, ViewMaster, today.

Data Archiving Solutions: Any Data, Any System

Posted September 19, 2020 by Beth Osborne & filed under Healthcare, Pharmacy.

The world revolves around data, and so does your organization. The amount of data collected, stored, and used grows exponentially every day. Research suggests that in 2020 the volume of data globally will be 59 zettabytes and will climb to 149 by 2024. With so much data and a variety of software platforms, it creates challenges around accessibility and usability. That’s why so many turn to data archiving solutions.

What Type of Data Can You Archive?

With flexible data archiving solutions, there are few limitations to what you can archive. Generally, you’ll want to ensure the platform can store documents, data, and image files. The process of moving files to an archive is usually simple and doesn’t require much effort on your part.

There are certainly some questions you should ask when looking at possible vendors. Some of the most important include security, accessibility, searching and filtering, and the user experience.

Data Archiving and Legacy Migrations

Legacy migrations are often a tumultuous time for organizations. You’re deciding what data stays and what data goes. However, some of that data you may need to return for compliance or regulatory reasons. You may opt to keep other data because it’s vital to your operations—you just don’t want to convert. The easy, secure, and reliable option is data archiving solutions.

We Archive More than Patient Data

We began archiving data for pharmacies years ago. This process allowed pharmacies to retain documents to comply with record retention requirements. Then we started to archive data from EHRs, as well. Because of our experience and expertise with healthcare data, we developed a very robust product that delivers a host of features and is compliant with HIPAA and HITRUST. Our solution also encrypts data in transit and at rest to ensure its safety.

As our product matured, we began to see its applicability to more than just patient data. Any legacy system can be compatible with our data archiving tool, ViewMaster. Some possibilities include:

Employee and organizational data
Financial data
Customer data (i.e., CRMs)
Data analytics (historical data storage)
ERP systems
Production data

There’s really no limit to applying data archiving solutions to your business or industry.

Archiving Data from Live Systems

Archiving data isn’t only for legacy system decommissions. You can also move data from a live system. Many organizations choose to do this to improve the performance of the systems. Think of it as a secure storage portal. You’ll still have seamless access to retired data when necessary, but it’s not straining your systems. Your IT team will thank you for this!

Archiving Also Provides a Secure Backup

When you archive data, you also get a secure backup. This backup lives in a colocation data center so that in the event there’s a data incident, you can quickly retrieve this data. It’s an essential part of any disaster recovery plan.

Learn More About Our Archiving Tool

If you’re looking for a turnkey, intuitive, and configurable data archiving solution, then it’s time to explore ViewMaster. See how it works today by watching our video.

What Features Does Your Legacy Archiving System Need?

Posted September 9, 2020 by Beth Osborne & filed under Healthcare, Pharmacy.

To archive or not to archive? That’s not really a question anymore. Archiving a legacy system provides many benefits for healthcare organizations. When selecting a platform, you’ll want to compare features, but what ones are critical for a legacy archiving system? Let’s find out.

Making the Case for Archiving

Just in case you’re on the fence about archiving, here are some more details on how it benefits healthcare.

Streamlining workflows: Using a central repository for old records means there’s one spot to look, not multiple legacy systems.
Meeting medical record retention regulations: You must keep patient records to satisfy requirements. Archiving allows you to do this with fewer challenges.
Saving you money: Legacy systems are expensive to keep running. Archiving platforms are much more cost-effective.
Compliance and security: Older systems that no longer receive updates could be ripe for hacker penetration. Cloud-based archiving solutions are safer and meet HIPAA and HITRUST compliance.

To achieve these advantages, you’ll need to find a legacy archiving system with specific features.

Must-Have Features for Your Legacy Archiving System

Many platforms have the same foundational functionality. However, not all deliver the necessary features. Further, many aren’t healthcare specific, so they may not meet your specifications. When seeking an archiving solution, these are the attributes there are non-negotiable.

Search and filtering: The system should have a robust search and filtering capability so you can find what you need fast.
Audit reporting: You never know when an audit may come your way. If you don’t have reporting abilities, you can spend hours or even days gathering information. Make it easy for your staff with print-ready audit reports.
Encryption: Beyond compliance and basic security, opt for a tool that encrypts data, providing another layer to protect data.
Storage of documents, images, and data: One thing lacking from many systems is the ability to hold images or the inability to transfer certain formats. Images are critical for record retention. Pharmacies often want to archive patient signatures, while hospitals and providers need to store x-rays, scans, or pictures. Make sure that the system you select is compatible with the images you want to archive.
Web-based: When an archive is web-based, users can access it from any device with a password. You aren’t limited to specific machines. If your system doesn’t provide this kind of accessibility, you’ll likely face productivity challenges and delays.
Simplicity: Not all technology has a steep learning curve. You certainly don’t want to deploy a system that requires hours of training and is unnecessarily complex. Choose a system with an intuitive interface, and most people can learn in just a few minutes.
Multiple locations: Pharmacies and healthcare systems often have more than one location. If that’s your situation, you need a tool that can handle this yet still be under the same centralized archive. Otherwise, you’ll have to toggle back and forth.
Permissions: With multi-location scenarios or just in general, you probably need different permissions for different users. For instance, you may limit some users to a specific location, while admins have unfettered access.

Ready to Find the Right Legacy Archiving System?

If you’re ready to ditch legacy systems and archive, we invite you to learn more about our solution—ViewMaster. It’s user-friendly, scalable, affordable, and secure. See how it works by watching our video. Then book a quick demo with our healthcare data management experts!