Archiving Allscripts EMR

Whether you are in the process of migrating from Allscripts EMR to a new system or you are consolidating your disparate legacy systems including your Allscripts EMR – understanding what to do with your legacy data is an important step in maintaining access and compliance with your healthcare data.

Archiving your Allscripts EMR data can help your healthcare organization increase patient safety, improve patient outcomes, and maintain compliance for the lifetime of your archive.

What is Allscripts EMR Archiving?

If you haven’t gotten too far into your research about medical record retention options when migrating from Allscripts or consolidating your legacy data – Archiving is a great place to start. Archiving your EMR data provides your organization with a web-based application that is used for long-term storage of required data. Depending on the archiving application you choose, you may be able to consolidate data from multiple legacy systems to a single repository for ongoing access to patient data, financial information, reports, and more.

How can archiving your Allscripts EMR benefit your organization?

In order to understand how the benefits of Allscripts EMR archiving may benefit your organization it is important to first understand what problems you are attempting to solve by archiving your Allscripts EMR system.

Clinical Access

On average, healthcare providers will spend approximately 15 minutes using an EMR or EHR for every patient they see throughout the day. One third of that time is used to review the patient’s complete medical record including important information that they need to best serve the patient. As your clinicians rely on the EMR data at the point of care, their patient’s complete medical history should be available for them to understand the whole patient story. Many times the information they need the greatest access to includes the most recent medical history, allergies, medications, immunizations, procedures, and results, as well as any legacy notes from past patient encounters.

An archive such as ACERT™ provides your clinicians with a single sign on login to access legacy patient data from multiple disparate legacy systems which saves both time and resources clinicians need when treating patients by improving workflows, providing accurate data for patient care, and supporting efficient patient search.

Reduced Cost

While your organization may be entertaining the idea of maintaining your legacy Allscripts EMR as this is a straightforward option – the costs associated with maintaining each system begins to add up depending on the ongoing level of access, number of users, and maintenance.

Servers & Hardware

The costs associated with maintaining EMR hardware, servers, and infrastructure continues to increase year over year. Depending on the age of your Allscripts legacy system, as well as any other disparate legacy systems you continue to maintain, your organization could face additional costs for troubleshooting and servicing obsolete technology for the life of your data which ranges from 6 to 25 years depending on the state’s legal requirements.

Migrating your legacy Allscripts EMR data to an archive like ACERT™, you can minimize the number of servers and additional hardware needed to maintain the data housed in each additional legacy system.

Applications and Operating Systems

Maintaining legacy systems such as Allscripts EMR requires your organization to continue support and maintenance by your vendor. Even if your organization only needs read-only access to your Allscripts EMR system, you will still need to continue paying maintenance fees that may range from $4,000 – $8,000 yearly depending on the number of users that need access to these systems.

On the other hand, an ACERT™ archive can reduce your costs exponentially without requiring ongoing maintenance fees. You will then be able to retire each legacy system you choose to bring over to the archive in addition to your Allscripts EMR system, thus removing on-going fees from your vendors.

What data can be archived from Allscripts EMR?

For AllScripts Pro EHR/EMR users, there is a vast amount of data that can be brought over to the archive. Two Point has worked over the last decade to cultivate a list of frequently requested and required information to be included in the archive.

On a general level the following information may be chosen to be included in the Allscripts archive:

Discrete Allscripts EMR Data
- Providers
- Facilities
- Patients
- Documents
- Encounters
- Medical Procedures
- Patient Insurance Information
The following is a breakdown of current reports that can be loaded into the archive for later access.
- EMR Reports
  - A per-patient summary will be generated in the archive of all encounters for that patient based on the facesheet information.
- Financial Reports
  - If your EMR is also inclusive of PM, all location reports will be included for PM specific extracts.
- Visit PDF Reports
  - Based on the screenshot examples of your Allscripts EMR provided by your organization, per-encounter summaries will be generated and loaded to the archive.
- Lab and Procedure Reports
- Message Reports
  - Nurse Notes
  - Patient Messages and Correspondence
- Other Reports
  - Visits