Ashland Health Center Preserves Eight Years of Historical Data During System Upgrade

The Challenge

When Ashland Health Center (AHC) prepared to upgrade its core healthcare information system, the move involved more than replacing one system with another. AHC needed to preserve eight years of historical patient and financial data while maintaining compliance, continuity of care, and access for future reference.

The legacy environment was substantial and complex. It included more than 100 GB of information, 3,519 medical record numbers, and 58,541 patient encounters across multiple formats, including PDFs, Word documents, and images. Each record had to remain accurate, complete, and usable after the migration.

Additionally, AHC needed to meet HIPAA and retention requirements while ensuring clinical, administrative, and financial teams could still retrieve the historical records they relied on. They needed secure, role-based access through Single Sign-On and a phased approach that would protect day-to-day workflows during the transition.

The Solution

Access worked with Ashland Health Center to plan and execute a phased migration strategy that reduced risk and gave stakeholders clear visibility throughout the project.

The process began with discovery and sample extraction. This allowed AHC stakeholders to review representative archived records, confirm scope, and validate the approach before full extraction began. From there, Access securely connected to the legacy system and extracted data in five validated batches, giving AHC structured checkpoints throughout the migration.

Clinical, financial, and departmental data was preserved in its original formats and archived in Access Unify® | Health, a secure cloud-based platform built to help healthcare organizations retire legacy systems while keeping historical records compliant, searchable, and accessible.

Throughout the project, Access maintained a steady operating rhythm with regular status updates, milestone reviews, batch-level validation, and proactive issue resolution. That communication helped keep the project moving and gave AHC confidence that questions, issues, and requests would be addressed quickly.

“The regularly scheduled calls really help to make sure everyone is aware of what is going on,” said Sandi Wright, CEO of Ashland Health Center. “It ensures that the project can keep moving along. That way if any issues or requests come up, they can be handled in a timelier fashion. Also being a Best in KLAS company says a lot.”

Access also provided training sessions to support user adoption as AHC moved away from its legacy system.

The Results

Ashland Health Center completed its system upgrade with its historical data intact, accessible, and secure.

More than 505,000 clinical and financial documents were extracted, validated, and archived across five approved migration batches. The project finished ahead of the planned 20-week timeline, giving AHC a centralized archive without delaying the broader transition.

Today, authorized users can retrieve historical records on demand through Access Unify^® | Health, reducing reliance on legacy infrastructure while supporting patient care, audits, reporting, and everyday workflows.

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Legacy workforce systems still hold records teams may need for years.

Access helps healthcare organizations preserve administrative, financial, and clinical data so teams can retire old systems with less operational risk.

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