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Top Considerations for Athenahealth EMR Archive

If you plan to archive athenahealth data, your healthcare organizations must be sure the archival process is accurate, secure, and compliant. After all, this decision comes with a lot of responsibility, and knowing a healthcare organization’s data is protected and managed correctly is critical. At Two Point, we offer athenahealth data management services to give you the confidence and peace of mind you deserve when archiving and migrating athenahealth data. We will discuss these services today, as well as the top considerations to keep in mind for an athenahealth EMR archive, and much more.

Athenahealth Data Archival and Storage

Data archiving is not the same as a data backup. Backups are intended to restore an existing system in a disaster recovery or business continuity scenario. Inherently they assume the system in question still exists, but has experienced some kind of fault, failure, or outage, and thus needs to be restored to working order. Archiving, in contrast, assumes that the system in question no longer exists and doesn’t need to. Instead, a healthcare 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.

Top Considerations for an athenahealth EMR archive

For healthcare organizations planning to archive their athenahealth data, there are four top considerations to keep in mind: ease of use, cost-effectiveness, security, and compliance.

  • Ease of use

Data archive solutions should be easy to use. This ensures athenahealth data can be quickly and easily accessed at any time. The archive must also have a user-friendly interface to make it simple for users at all levels of technical experience to access the archive with minimal effort.

  • Cost-effectiveness

It’s vital to consider the cost-effectiveness of athenahealth data archiving, as healthcare organizations must strike a balance between cost savings and compliance and security measures. Two Point offers archive solutions that offer both cost savings and comprehensive security and compliance support.

  • Security

Data security is critical for athenahealth data archival. With valuable data at stake, healthcare organizations must ensure their data is always kept secure. Two Point’s healthcare data archive solutions help guarantee data is protected and archived with the utmost security.

  • Compliance

Finally, to remain compliant with federal regulations (including HIPAA compliance) and industry best practices, health data archival should include compliance checks to guarantee the data is stored per government regulations.

Types of athenahealth Data to Archive

Healthcare organizations must also decide precisely which data they will store in the archive and keep in mind that archiving this EMR requires a vendor extract. Athenahealth will provide CSV extract containing patient demographics, appointments, and financial transactions (charges, adjustments, payments), as well as patient charts including scanned documents in PDF format. If necessary (though not required for audits) athenahealth can provide ERA files that contain what is necessary to recreate the athenahealth-replicated EOB’s.

Why Choose Us?

Various components are required for the successful completion of a healthcare data archiving strategy. Obviously an environment to host an archive is needed. This would include a backend database application (usually some form of SQL), some sort of large scale storage to house documents and other unstructured data, an application layer to serve clients (such as an https server application), a client application (such as a web browser), and a pdf viewer to view and print the generated reports.
 
These may be provided by the healthcare organization itself, in the case of on premise hosting, or some of these may be provided by the archiving vendor in the case of a cloud or SAAS solution. These tools should be uniform across all individual archived applications to achieve maximum efficiency and uniformity. Other technologies may be in use on a per project basis that involve providing the capability to extract data from a particular application, to transform it to the standardized data model of the archive, or to convert proprietary image and document formats to industry standard ones, etc.

These would typically be provided by the vendor and be based on that vendor’s methodology. For example, Two Point uses exclusively in-house purpose-built tools for ETL (extract, transform, and load) purposes, which enhances our ability to deliver archives on time and on budget. The most important tool is the experience and knowledge of the archiving vendor in all cases, but particularly based on the age of the platform or technology in use in the system to be archived. Two Point, for example, has 30 years experience extracting and understanding data from proprietary applications, and a breadth of experience across various modern and archaic technologies, and can frequently accomplish projects that other vendors find challenging for this reason.
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