The Challenge
As Faith Health contemplated their transition to Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) system, they realized they needed to retire eight legacy EHR applications while preserving decades of clinical, departmental, and scanned patient data.
The Solutions
Data extraction, validation, and migration into the Access Unify® cloud platform
The Results
About Faith Health
Serving Northeast and North-Central Nebraska, Faith Health provides care across a growing network of primary care clinics, urgent care, emergency services, specialty services, and outreach locations.
Faith Health made a strategic decision to transition to the Epic electronic health record (EHR) system as part of its broader digital advancement. However, to fully embrace this new system, they needed to retire eight legacy EHR applications containing decades of clinical and departmental data.
As Faith Health evaluated what needed to be archived, they identified additional pockets of information across the organization, including specialty workflows, acquired practices, scanned documents, and imaging files. These records of varying formats needed to be accurate, searchable, and readily available after all legacy applications were decommissioned.
The timeline added another layer of urgency as Faith Health needed to complete the archival process before legacy vendor contracts ended.
The complexity of the project necessitated a trusted partner capable of maintaining high data integrity and security standards while meeting tight project timelines.
Access supported Faith Health with a structured archival process that included extraction, conversion, validation, and secure storage of legacy data within Access Unify® | Health, a HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2-certified, cloud-based archival platform.
Working closely with Faith Health’s IT, HIM, and operational stakeholders, Access helped determine what data needed to be retained, how it should be extracted and validated, and how users would access it after the legacy systems were retired.
Access also helped Faith Health navigate some of the most common barriers in legacy system archival, including limited access to hosted databases, nonstandard extraction paths, and scanned documents or imaging files that weren’t easy to locate, structure, or export. Brian Sterud, Chief Information Officer at Faith Health, noted that Access’s experience was especially valuable when data could not be retrieved through standard methods.
“The expertise of the team and the things that they were able to do made it easier on us in the process.”
Over the course of seven months, Access processed 50 batches of data across eight legacy systems and securely archived the information within the Access Unify® | Health solution. Each batch was reviewed and validated in collaboration with the Faith Health team to ensure data accuracy, integrity, and completeness.
In collaboration with Access, Faith Health met their defined deadlines and kept their costs in line with their expectations. Additionally, Access’ diligence and responsiveness helped Faith Health stay aligned with the goals and objectives of their broader transition plan.
With the successful implementation of Access Unify® | Health, Faith Health gained reliable, real-time access to their historical patient records. Clinicians and authorized teams can now retrieve archived records from a centralized environment, helping support patient care, HIM workflows, release of information, audits, reporting, and long-term retention needs.
The archive also reduced Faith Health’s reliance on outdated applications, helping the organization move forward with Epic more efficiently. And by validating legacy data during migration, Faith Health strengthened data governance and improved confidence in the completeness and usability of its historical records.
Brian’s advice to healthcare leaders undertaking a similar task is to plan early, work backward from system and contract deadlines, understand the full scope of data being left behind, and choose a partner that can support your organization beyond the initial archive.
“You might think that an archival project is a one-time thing… I would advise against that. Choose a great vendor because you’re going to be with them for a while,” Brian advised.
Access Unify | Health helps healthcare organizations archive historical clinical, financial, and business data so teams can decommission outdated systems without losing access to the records that still matter.
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