By Michael Pittroff, Archiving Specialist at Verisma

September 26, 2025

Health information management (HIM) professionals are the stewards of patient data – uniquely positioned at the intersection of clinical care, compliance, and system operations. Their expertise ensures medical records are managed with the highest standards of accuracy, accessibility and confidentiality.

When organizations archive legacy applications, HIM’s insights are essential to guarantee data is preserved, retrievable, and fit for future needs—from patient care to compliance audits.

Preserving Metadata, without Compromise

When HIM isn’t involved in archiving, critical elements of medical records can be lost. Preserving metadata beyond extract, transform and load (ETL) tools forcing providers to pick-and-choose which data they want to bring over during the mapping process – details like lab reference ranges, test locations, and result flags – is essential for clinical context, continuity of care, and regulatory response.

Without this vital information, organizations risk incomplete records which could impact patient safety, hinder responses to subpoenas or audits, and jeopardize compliance with professional regulations – especially important as OCR changes the definition of the designated record set.

Administrative and technical decisions made without HIM’s input may also compromise data integrity or accessibility, potentially leading to inefficiencies. Providers searching multiple systems for medical records for hours, days or weeks – rather than benefiting from a unified software platform in seconds – can delay care, frustrating staff and patients.

Supporting Complex Health Information Workflows

When HIM’s absent, projects may focus solely on IT, cost or infrastructure – prioritizing financial savings or technical feasibility over clinical or compliance requirements. This shift can lead to solutions that, while budget-friendly, might not meet all regulatory standards or support complex health information workflows.

Without HIM advocacy, organizations may not recognize the ongoing value of complete, context-rich records supporting everything from accounts receivable (AR) burndown in revenue cycle management to defending against legal challenges. Overlooking these priorities can create unintended risks and missed opportunities for value creation within the organization – reducing overhead associated with infrastructure and licensing fees.

Ensuring Integrity, Accessibility and Compliance

HIM professionals care deeply about participating in archiving decisions because these projects directly affect their core responsibilities – ensuring the integrity, accessibility and compliance of health records. HIM’s changing structure – moving under IT, compliance, revenue cycle, or access – means their voice can easily be marginalized unless they have a seat at the table.

Their involvement is crucial to safeguarding patient data, supporting clinical care, and protecting their organization from regulatory and legal risks.

Reducing Data Breaches

Legacy applications also increase the risk of data breaches because they often operate on outdated, unsupported servers lacking essential security updates and patches – making them vulnerable to attacks.

As staff retire or move on these systems can go unmonitored, with knowledge of their operation lost – leaving sensitive information exposed to accidental and malicious threats. Accessing data sometimes requires lowering security measures, and without proper audit trails or compliance with current regulations, organizations face heightened risks of unauthorized disclosures (UAD), legal penalties, and data loss.

Migrating to secure, modern platforms and involving HIM in the archiving process are vital steps to protect patient data and preserve regulatory compliance.

Influencing Leadership to Adopt Best Practices

Advocacy is essential for HIM, ensuring their expertise shapes organizational decisions about data archiving and legacy system management. By articulating the value they bring – such as preventing data loss, preserving metadata, and facilitating efficient release of information (ROI) – they can influence leadership to adopt best practices serving clinical and operational needs.

Advocacy also positions HIM as indispensable partners in broader initiatives, from cost reduction to revenue cycle optimization, demonstrating their strategic value in the evolving health data landscape.

Archiving Today to Prepare for Tomorrow

Health information professionals aren’t just “nice-to-have” participants at the archiving table. They’re critical to ensuring data integrity, compliance, and operational efficiency. HIM’s absence can lead to costly mistakes, incomplete records, and organizational risk. Their presence and advocacy empower healthcare organizations to meet today’s challenges and prepare for tomorrow’s needs – especially when faced with the next merger and acquisition (M&A) and you’re back at the table to archive, again.

Ready to revolutionize clinical data management? We’re here to help. Contact us today.

By Anupriyo Chakravarti, Chief Technology & Product Officer at Verisma

September 5, 2025

Health information departments face mounting pressure to process record requests faster, maintain compliance, and manage growing data volumes while navigating staffing shortages and budget constraints. In response, we introduced Verisma’s responsible artificial intelligence (AI) solution suite built specifically for health information management (HIM). The suite combines intelligent automation with human oversight to improve speed, quality, and regulatory compliance – without removing professionals from sensitive decisions.

We’ve developed a feature set working together to streamline intake, improve compliance, accelerate retrieval, and enhance support for requestors, all grounded in a human-in-the-loop approach keeping HIM experts in control.

In this post, we’ll take you through each of these features and share how we’re approaching them and impacting the market.

Human-in-the-Loop by Design

Many healthcare AI offerings aim to fully automate decision-making, risking errors in sensitive record handling, compliance violations, and loss of trust. At Verisma, we embed human oversight at key decision gates – intake validation, authorization checking, quality, and final release, so outcomes remain accurate, ethical and defensible.

In practice, that means:

• Flagging commingled records before release.
• Pre-populating intake data for HIM validation to compress cycle time.
• Handling routine status calls with a digital support agent, while keeping a speak-to-a-human option at every step.

One of the first impact areas we’ll dive into is improving compliance and quality.

AI-Supported Compliance and Quality

Sensitive categories (e.g., behavioral health or substance-use information) can be missed in manual workflows, leading to unauthorized disclosures (UAD). Technology Assisted Review™ – our quality assurance engine – uses AI to flag sensitive content (including state overlays and 42 CFR Part 2) and route exceptions for expert review, with auditable human approval before disclosure.

After a new lab interface was deployed by a health system we service, our Intelligent Quality Review solution detected cross-patient commingling and flagged it for human investigation, leading to remediation of the glitch in the lab interface to the electronic health record (EHR). Over 18 months, this safeguard helped prevent potential mis-release of ~200,000 records under client validation and compliance oversight.

With even more emphasis on quality, we can tackle one of the largest challenges in release of information (ROI), structuring all the requests that come through disparate channels and making them actionable, fast.

Structuring Data at Intake

Manual logging and categorization are time-consuming and error-prone, often causing misrouted requests, billing issues, and delays. Verisma Intake Intelligence extracts key fields and accurately classifies requests, improving turnaround time and significantly reducing logging time (based on client implementations).

When immediate processing is critical, such as stat or legal requests with statutory deadlines, requests route to Verisma Inbox™, where a rules engine determines urgency and logs the prioritized request into Verisma Release Manager® (VRM), always with human-in-the-loop verification. VRM is a HITRUST-certified cloud platform tracking, auditing and processing each request. It enforces Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), state laws, and provider policies; timestamps every action for discoverability; and uses smart queues to maintain SLAs.

Retrieving records across multiple health system record sources is a persistent bottleneck and the next area we’ll address.

Seamless Retrieval Across 7,000+ Connections

Verisma’s Integration Engine retrieves the right records at the right time using specialized connectors, like standard-based APIs (FHIR R4, HL7 v2), where available, and universal connectors, like monitored robotic process automation (RPA), when necessary, spanning 7,000+ connections to EHR instances and health data sources.

The platform assembles a release packet aligned to request type and documented patient authorization, then flags it for automated quality check and human approval, absorbing surge volume without incremental headcount and accelerating turnaround.

We know the last thing providers want is to manage complaints from requestors because they’re frustrated and don’t know the status of their request. Our final feature in the suite aims to elevate the requestor experience and meet their needs 24/7.

AI-Powered Requestor Support

Patients, attorneys, and other requestors want clarity without delay. Our 24/7 multilingual digital agent answers common questions, provides status updates, and escalates complex issues to staff when needed. It detects a preferred language, audits all interactions, and integrates with VRM, improving satisfaction and reducing average handling time, while always offering a speak-to-a-human option.

Success, Built on Trust

In summary, Verisma’s AI workflows are fully auditable – with immutable logs, reviewer attestations, and exception trails. Models operate within PHI-safe boundaries (encryption in transit and at rest, along with least-privilege access), undergo regular evaluation and drift monitoring, and use confidence thresholds automatically triggering human review. It’s how we pair the speed of AI with the judgment of HIM professionals safely and provide:

• Logging speed and efficiency gains via intelligent intake.
• Accelerated record retrieval with smart, scalable integration.
• Enhanced protection for 2,300+ facilities from UADs with Technology Assisted Review™.
• 24/7 multilingual support through our digital agent, with seamless escalation to people.

HIM departments need partners who understand operational realities and deliver practical innovation. With our responsible AI suite, we’re empowering professionals, protecting patient data, and shaping the future of health information, together.