Health Information Professionals (HIP) Week, April 18-22, 2022, recognizes the tremendous contributions HIP teams make to improve the quality of patient care. With a mission of “empowering people to impact health,” the belief is that great possibilities are achieved when we work together toward a common goal. This common goal, with HIP leadership, is to transform health and healthcare by connecting people, systems, and ideas. With that in mind, here is how Harmony Healthcare IT’s HealthData Platform™ product and service offerings support three priorities of The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) 2022 Advocacy Agenda.
1. Improving the Patient Health Journey through Access to Information, Privacy and Equity
As a data management firm that moves and stores patient, employee and business records for healthcare organizations, Harmony Healthcare IT offers solutions that align with interoperability practices defined in the 21st Century Cures Act and represent best practices for security and privacy. Our goal is to provide legacy data in a consumable format that aligns with CCDA and FHIR standards to harmonize technology with the patient care experience. Whether you are preparing active or legacy patient records for interoperability, our team of experts may be called upon to assist with the development of a data management strategy and how legacy data will play a role.
2. Ensuring the Quality and Integrity of Health Information
When it comes to archiving medical records, every data element must be retained with 100% accuracy. Our data validation process is vital to ensuring the consistency, accuracy, completeness and quality of every record that is migrated from a legacy system to be archived. Our integrated validation process is a standard feature within our long-term record storage platform, HealthData Archiver®. Designed with the health information professional in mind, the feature eliminates manual spreadsheets and emails often associated with the validation reporting process between client and vendors. This is a time saver and reduces potential errors during the archival process.
In addition, HealthData Archiver® includes strike thru, notes and addenda features. These features show how data was displayed in the source system (pre-archive) and, subsequently, when it was changed or corrected (post-archive). This could be helpful if a result was erroneously recorded in the source system, or if a document that should be part of the original legal record never got scanned pre-archive.
3. Advancing Healthcare Transformation
This priority focuses on improving workflows, interoperability, and security.
- Workflows – Harmony Healthcare IT’s HealthData Archiver® offers:
- Release of Information. Individual patient records can print on demand using flexible print filters and/or pre-defined print templates. Templates can default to common record request types such as patient, attorney, payer or employer to ensure that compliant record sets are generated consistently and efficiently. Multiple record requests can be generated in batch and/or by date range—a great feature for rapid compliance to bulk records requests (I.e., an audit).
- Record Purge. Designed to accept a multitude of if-then scenarios based on record retention policy, HealthData Archiver® is flexible in how it creates, manages and allows for exceptions with purge rules. Criterion for record destruction might include date of last service, date of discharge, date of birth, document or data type (i.e., behavioral health), etc. Exceptions may include legal hold, RAC audit, clinical research or other similar situations which might prevent a medical record from being destroyed.
- Interoperability – Harmony Healthcare IT’s HealthData Integrator® addresses:
- Single Sign-On (SSO). SSO from the go-forward EHR to our active archive, HealthData Archiver®, provides clinicians with instant accessibility to the historical patient record. From their EHR, clinicians seamlessly connect, in patient-context, to the legacy medical record. This workflow enhancing feature is available for major EMR brands, including Epic, Cerner, MEDITECH, Allscripts, Athena and others. It also supports numerous formats like Oauth/OpenID, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML 2.0).
- Patient Matching. We ensure that patient information is as accurate as possible. There are many master patient indexing processes taking place within different health systems and with EHR and archiving vendors that Harmony Healthcare IT navigates and utilizes to tie archived records in HealthData Archiver® to the right patient in the go-forward EHR.
- 21st Century Cures Act. We align our efforts to support our clients’ needs for data integration in the face of growing requirements—partnering with them in the planning, strategy and implementation steps needed to meet the Cures Act requirements for interoperability. Check out our recent blogs on this topic for more information:
- Security – From a security standpoint, legacy EHR systems create risks for healthcare delivery organizations of all sizes. Our team works with providers to prepare for technology-based disasters, natural disasters, and physical disasters. With some integrated delivery networks managing up to hundreds of legacy systems with varying degrees of security and stability still intact, an important step forward is to consolidate legacy patient, employee and business data silos to ensure safe record retention for the next 7, 10 or even 25+ years. Harmony Healthcare IT’s focus on managing data exclusively for the healthcare industry drives our commitment to security, such as our endpoint detection and response tools as well as our achievement of HITRUST CSF® certification and subsequent re-certifications.
Harmony Healthcare IT’s cloud-based storage solutions, HealthData Archiver®, HealthData AR Manager® and HealthData Locker™ provide options to enable stored data for interoperability leveraging HealthData Integrator®. These integrated solutions can help HIP teams in healthcare settings worldwide.
Recognizing that Harmony Healthcare IT’s solutions are counted on by HIP professionals worldwide, our team is committed to continuously strengthening its platform and delivering capabilities necessary for HIP professionals to efficiently and securely do their job.
Congratulations to everyone involved in HIP Week – our team couldn’t do data migration and archival without you. #HIPWeek22
