Healthcare organizations manage dozens of retired applications and systems, each holding years of patient data. Every merger, acquisition, or system upgrade leaves behind another digital archive, resulting in a compounded maze of disconnected systems, each with their own logins, interfaces, and data.
For Health Information Management (HIM) teams, this has created an unsustainable – and risky – burden. The average Release of Information (ROI) request involving legacy data can take days or even weeks to fulfill, with teams racing against HIPAA’s 30-day deadline.
Here’s how a typical ROI search goes:
- receive the request,
- guess which systems might have the data,
- juggle multiple logins, and
- search folder by folder across platforms.
It’s a tedious and time-consuming process. For example, a request that spans four legacy systems, each requiring 15 minutes of searching, is an hour just to locate the data. For organizations processing hundreds of requests every month, this means valuable staff time is spent inefficiently. We’ve seen ROI teams as large as 87 people just to manage this level of effort.
When you’re manually searching across multiple systems, incomplete record retrieval is also a likely risk. HIPAA requires complete medical records, but when those records are scattered across legacy systems, completeness is questionable.
HIM professionals didn’t get into healthcare to be digital archaeologists. New staff training is increasingly complex, requiring knowledge of multiple legacy systems and institutional memory about where data lives. Turnover is rising as professionals look for roles where they can do actual HIM work instead of endless system navigation.
Here’s the irony… the same technology advancements that improve patient care compound this complexity on the back end. Each new EMR, merger, or upgrade promises better efficiency and outcomes, but the archived data from old systems remains trapped in digital silos, accessible only through outdated interfaces and specialized knowledge.
The current approach isn’t sustainable. As organizations continue to grow and regulatory requirements keep expanding, managing legacy data system-by-system will only get worse.
The answer isn’t hiring more people or better training on outdated processes. It’s a fundamental shift: stop organizing archived data around the systems that created it and start organizing it around the patients it represents.
In our next post, we’ll show you how leading healthcare organizations are making this shift and why it’s more than just a tech upgrade.