Data privacy and security are critical as healthcare providers collect demographic, financial, and clinical information from patients. However, healthcare data security is a moving target with new threats emerging daily.

Last year, an astonishing 133 million records were exposed, stolen, or otherwise impermissibly disclosed. Nearly 80% of these data breaches were due to hacking incidents, and organizations are especially vulnerable when sharing or moving information between people or systems. Adhering to data security standards is important; however, organizations must take additional proactive steps to ensure data migration doesn’t leave them susceptible to breaches, regulatory fines, and exposure of sensitive information.

While it may be tempting to think of data migration as a technology-centric project, in reality, it’s more about business-critical risk mitigation on the journey toward modernizing clinical care. In other words, it’s about ensuring the right information flows successfully and securely from one system to another to improve care delivery and outcomes.
 

8 Data Security Standards for Protecting Patient Privacy

The following eight best practices can promote healthcare data security during a data migration project that requires archiving:
 

1. Perform a risk assessment before, during, and after data migration

Risk assessments help healthcare organizations identify and assess gaps that could compromise healthcare cybersecurity. Performing a risk assessment before data migration sets the stage for strong data privacy and security during the remainder of the project. However, issues can emerge at any time, which is why it’s important to perform an assessment during and after the project, as well.

Risk assessments should focus on technical, physical, and administrative safeguards to uncover vulnerabilities in systems, processes, and personnel. When performed correctly and frequently, the assessments help organizations prioritize security investments and develop remediation plans. Risk assessments should be comprehensive and include portable devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops that access and share patient information. Other connected devices include smart medical equipment and wearable monitoring devices. These technologies often have limited healthcare data security features and can be particularly vulnerable to hacking or malware during data migration.
 

2. Ensure strong encryption and data transfer protocols

Data encryption — a recommended healthcare cybersecurity measure under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)— converts plain text or data into a coded form that’s inaccessible to anyone without a decryption key. Without this key, unauthorized users can’t modify the data either, making it more difficult for hackers to exploit sensitive information.

Organizations can leverage encryption not only when data is stored ”at rest” in the electronic health record, a portable device, or other health information technology system, but also when it’s transmitted (e.g., during a data migration project or when sending data to a payer or external agency). Through data encryption, organizations demonstrate their commitment to data privacy and security, including during data migration projects.

While migrating data, it’s important to choose the correct encryption method (e.g., symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, and hashing algorithms) based on the type of information, the level of protection required, and the organization’s existing infrastructure. Ensuring appropriate key management is equally important, as is training staff members on encryption protocols and procedures.
 

3. Implement strict access controls and user authentication

Healthcare organizations must be cautious in granting access to data and applications as they migrate their data. Only individuals who need this access to perform their job duties should receive it.

In addition, organizations can assign permissions based on an employee’s position and responsibilities. Role-based access along with multi-factor authentication (i.e., requiring users to provide two or more verification factors to gain access) helps reduce data breaches and limit access to sensitive data before, during, and after data migration.
 

4. Use compliance monitoring logs

Compliance monitoring logs help organizations understand who accesses what information, when, and from where. Armed with this information, organizations can detect anomalies and unusual activity (e.g., large data transfers or access from unexpected locations) more easily, allowing leaders to quickly respond to potential security incidents and promote healthcare data security during the data migration process.
 

5. Create a backup recovery plan

Despite an organization’s best efforts, errors, omissions, and other challenges may occur during data migration projects. Creating a backup recovery plan ensures business continuity. This plan should address when and how organizations will access and maintain secure, offsite backups of sensitive data. The plan should also outline regular testing of backup and restore procedures.
 

6. Provide employee security training

When it comes to data privacy and security, employees are often an organization’s greatest asset as well as their biggest risk. While employees can take proactive steps to promote healthcare cybersecurity, they can also make mistakes that cause data breaches. Healthcare data security training helps everyone understand threats and vulnerabilities so they know what missteps to avoid.

Training should address how to identify and report potential healthcare data security threats, and how to maintain patient privacy and ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations. Training is not a “one and done” event. Rather, it’s an ongoing process that keeps employees up to date on the latest security protocols, data security standards, and vulnerabilities. Ongoing training also promotes a culture of security awareness and demonstrates the organization’s commitment to healthcare cybersecurity.
 

7. Perform vendor due diligence

Working with contract specialists presents unique opportunities to protect sensitive patient data. These third-party entities must be able to articulate their ability to comply with security and privacy standards, and healthcare organizations should carefully review each entity’s policies, procedures, and technical safeguards before formal engagement. This includes any vendors involved in the data migration project itself.
 

8. Protect mobile electronics

Implementing device encryption, remote wiping capabilities, and mobile device management solutions (i.e., solutions that enforce security policies, monitor device usage, and remotely lock or erase lost or stolen devices) can help reduce vulnerabilities during a data migration project.

Segmenting networks to isolate connected devices from other systems can also help promote healthcare data security. For example, if a healthcare device becomes infected with malware, the threat is contained within its segment, preventing lateral movement across other connected technologies.
 

Uphold Best-in-Class Data Privacy and Security Protocols

As healthcare organizations embark on important data migration projects, they need an archive vendor that holds itself accountable to the highest data privacy and security standards in the industry. Verisma’s enterprise archiving solution, Olah™, is SOC 2 Type II compliant, ensuring it protects customer and patient data. Contact Verisma to learn more about Olah.

When it comes to clinical data migration, the 5P’s principle (Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance) helps you achieve optimal results. In other words, when converting and transferring healthcare data from one system or location to another, the more you identify and address potential clinical data management challenges in advance, the more successful your migration project will be.

In fact, without a pre-project plan and data migration checklist, your entire project could get derailed or cause security, privacy, compliance, or regulatory problems down the line. There’s also a lot of data to consider. The healthcare industry generates approximately 30% of the world’s data volume. By 2025, the compound annual growth rate of data for healthcare will reach 36%. That’s 6% faster than manufacturing, 10% faster than financial services, and 11% faster than media and entertainment.
 

6 Questions to Inform the Strategy in Your Data Migration Checklist

Justifying the time and cost investment of a data migration project can require answering several critical operational questions and getting ahead of potential risks. Consider these six questions before meeting with leadership or setting a budget:
 

1. Is a full or partial system migration most beneficial?

You’ll need to determine whether it makes sense to migrate all or only a subset of your data. As you consider the healthcare data life cycle, archiving data should be an important part of this conversation. Your conclusions will drive the cost and timeline of the entire data migration project, but there are other factors as well. With a full migration, you’re better able to meet regulatory compliance standards and will maintain complete access to patient information and historical clinical data – supporting care continuity, research, and data analysis and reporting. You also have to consider the importance of data integrity, however, and whether older information may be incomplete or in the wrong format, necessitating extra steps in the process. Migrating some data may be more efficient and allow for prioritization of the most high-value data and information, but you also lose the benefits of a full-system migration.
 

2. Which is better—a cloud-based or a hybrid approach to data migration?

While a hybrid approach to clinical data management may feel more familiar, the reality is that today’s cloud services are safe, secure, scalable, and affordable. Migration to the cloud enables you to convert massive amounts of complex data automatically, and it eliminates the need to pay maintenance fees for expensive in-house hardware. In addition, many cloud storage service vendors even provide backup options to give you an additional layer of security. So, it’s not surprising that 78% of healthcare organizations have either completed a cloud-based migration or are in the process of migrating their data to the cloud, according to a 2023 HIMSS Analytics Report.
 

3. When archiving data, is it best to work in phases or complete all the work at once?

There is no right answer, and that answer may depend on business needs, like resource management and minimization of operational disruption, or concerns about mitigation of errors and the flexibility to adjust to shifting priorities. While an all-at-once transfer typically involves taking systems down for a longer period, the advantage is that it’s a “one and done” proposition. With a phased approach, the data migration process is completed in pieces by running both systems in parallel, thus eliminating downtime.
 

4. Who should be on the clinical data migration team, and why?

The individuals on the clinical data migration team each should bring distinct skills, knowledge, and experience that make the overall project successful. For this team, you’ll need data owners and stewards (e.g., health information management [HIM] teams, researchers, and clinicians) who understand the importance of data integrity and have a vested interest in ensuring the data is migrated successfully. Clinicians use this data to provide patient care, researchers use it for clinical research projects, and HIM teams use it for critical business functions. All these individuals can provide essential information about potential gaps or problems during the data migration process.

The clinical data migration team should also include a group of functional experts who can validate the data and ensure it transfers accurately and maps correctly. Finally, the team needs professionals skilled in software development and data transfer who can resolve potential technical issues quickly and effectively. If your organization doesn’t have the right clinical data management expertise to manage the project, consider partnering with a third-party vendor that can help you achieve the results you seek.
 

5. What are the biggest challenges with archiving data?

One challenge of any data migration project is poor-quality data. Migrating and archiving data doesn’t negate existing data errors and omissions, and it may even exacerbate them. To combat this, perform data cleanup before starting the migration process. Identify records with mistakes, duplicates, or unnecessary details, then leverage data cleansing tools to get rid of inaccurate or damaged data. Implement data quality checks, validation rules, and data cleansing workflows at every stage of the migration project.

A second challenge is inconsistent data formats. Clinical data comes in a wide variety of formats, and there may also be special considerations for migrating images, multi-level patient records, and diagnostics. Converting the data to a consistent, interoperable structure—especially older data in legacy systems—becomes paramount.
 

6. What are the biggest potential risks with data migration?

There are three major risks that we’ve identified:

1. Migrating too much or too little data. A pre-planning assessment and data migration checklist are invaluable for understanding what data needs to be moved. Check all systems with electronic and paper-based clinical data to understand the depth and breadth of your data. Be sure not to omit data currently stored in aging legacy systems. Archiving data rather than migrating it may be the best option in some cases.
2. System disruptions and downtime. These can cause a negative impact on patient care, including treatment delays and compromises to patient safety.
3. Data loss or corruption during migration. This can also impact the quality of patient care because clinicians would not be able to access vital information when they need it.

The best way to mitigate these clinical data management risks is to stick to the data migration checklist and roadmap for completion that includes a clearly defined project scope, budget, specific data migration solutions and transfer methods you’ll use, and steps you’ll take to promote the importance of data integrity (e.g., ongoing and proactive validation and monitoring).
 

Alleviate Data Migration Concerns With a Skilled Partner

Anticipating and addressing clinical data management challenges ahead of time can make your data migration project, including archiving data, go smoothly. So can the right technology. See Olah™, Verisma’s simple, fast, and complete solution to data archiving, in action.

Let’s face it: Data migration projects can be daunting for healthcare organizations. You need to understand the full scope of complex, existing data, pull together the right team to make important decisions, and navigate situations where costs can add up quickly.

As you move data from one system to another (e.g., to consolidate data centers, leverage a better electronic health record (EHR), or retire an obsolete server), one of the critical decisions your team must make is how to maintain access to older, historical information (sometimes called “cold data”) that’s critical for patient care and business continuity. Errors and omissions during the complex migration process can have dire consequences.

Fortunately, data archiving—the process of transferring cold data to less expensive, secondary storage for safe patient care and compliance and regulatory purposes—can help streamline your data migration efforts, enabling you to save money, promote data integrity, and minimize workflow disruptions. Here’s how.

 

6 Benefits of Healthcare Data Archiving for Data Migration

 

1. Reduction in the Volume of Data to Migrate

Strategic archivers understand the importance of having a structured approach to data archiving, which drastically reduces the volume of data needed to migrate to a new system while simultaneously providing end users with efficient and uninterrupted access to cold data. With an archiving plan, you reduce the likelihood of unnecessary headaches during these transitions—your data resides safely in a storage system or cloud-based archival solution where users can access it when they need to. This is helpful for current as well as future data migration projects. In fact, data migration often becomes more manageable and cost effective when you strategically commit to ongoing data archiving. A lower volume of data lessens the overall complexity of the migration process that often equates to a faster transition to the new system.

 

2. Enhanced Data Quality and Integrity

With healthcare data archiving, you preserve the integrity of the data by mitigating the risk of data loss or corruption inherent in the migration process. Archiving cold data rather than migrating it leads to overall enhanced data quality. One caveat? Data quality checks and validations are important before, during, and after the data archiving process to ensure data integrity.

 

3. Archived Data Sets the Stage for Optimal System Performance

New systems perform optimally when end users have all the information they need at their fingertips. That’s where data archiving can help. With healthcare data archiving, your end users no longer need to access legacy systems in addition to the new system to gain a clear picture of the data in its totality. Archiving solutions can integrate directly with the new system to provide seamless access, drive maximum productivity and efficiency, and support ideal system performance in your organization. This heightened performance, in turn, promotes a positive return on investment, enhances end-user satisfaction, and may improve patient care quality as well.

 

4. Better Compliance With Data Retention Policies and Regulatory Requirements

Data archiving provides much-needed reassurance that you’ll meet regulatory obligations regarding data retention and patient privacy even while pursuing one or more complex data migration projects. You won’t need to worry about not having access to historical data, not being able to provide patients with timely access to their information, or accidentally destroying data prematurely. In addition, healthcare data archival solutions compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) safeguard your organization against potential legal, compliance, and security issues associated with data loss or unauthorized access that can have costly reputational and financial implications.

 

5. Lower Data Migration Costs

Archiving data before beginning a data migration project significantly reduces overall migration costs because your migration efforts only target mission-critical data—not all your data. This means there’s far less data to “clean,” or put into the format required for the new system. Cleaning the data may also require reorganizing folder structures, renaming files, extracting certain data points, and digitizing information. Even with automation, manual human review is needed during the data cleansing process. On the other hand, only migrating what you need allows you to focus on reducing duplicate records and providing direct access to organized records in the new system—all while older, historical data remains intact. Even after the data migration project is complete, continuing to archive older, historical data helps you reduce storage costs and data backups necessary to accommodate data growth in the new environment.

 

6. Archived Data Enhances Patient Care and Safety

Unimpeded access to archived data minimizes the risk of medical errors and adverse events because it provides clinicians with complete information about past diagnoses and treatment. This information is often critical to making informed decisions, and it may even save lives. Healthcare data archiving solutions enable your teams to retrieve treatment, medication, and prognosis information even during large data migration projects, thereby enhancing patient safety and quality of care.

 

What is Data Conversion’s Role in a Migration Project?

While archiving often serves as a beneficial component of data migration projects, there’s another aspect of the process it can sometimes be confused with. Before moving data, it’s helpful to consider compatibility and whether data conversion may be necessary.

What is data conversion? It’s a unique aspect of data migration that may be necessary for transferring data from one system or platform to another. Conversion ensures the data has the right format, structure, and standard necessary for the new system. It’s vital to both data integrity and accessibility and should be discussed in the early planning stages of any new project.

 

The Ongoing Importance of Healthcare Data Archiving

Healthcare data archival will continue to play a pivotal role in data migration, ensuring the preservation, accessibility, and integrity of historical data. As healthcare organizations migrate to new EHRs and other novel systems, strategic data archiving will be paramount importance. Without it, stakeholders may not have access to historical data necessary to derive accurate insights and patient care decisions.

Prioritizing data archival ensures organizations can ultimately leverage all—not just some—of their data effectively.

See Olah™, Verisma’s simple, fast, and complete solution to data archiving, in action.

The baseline standard for healthcare organizations aiming to stay at the forefront of innovation is continual implementation of advanced and emerging technologies. In fact, 85% of healthcare leaders recently said their organization’s digital and technology budget would increase this year. The top three priorities for investment included cybersecurity infrastructure, electronic health record (EHR) integration and modernization, and digital front door or virtual care. Collectively, these technologies increase an organization’s ability to attract and retain patients, provide value-based care that improves clinical outcomes and lowers costs, and streamline operational efficiencies.

Healthcare technology isn’t the only driver of modernization, however. So is having a comprehensive strategy for data migration—one that includes data assessment, cleanup, structuring, conversion, archiving, migration, and validation. Organizations need a clear plan to move data from one system to another so they can continue to capitalize on the value of that data. In this article, we’ll provide six reasons why legacy system migration is a key step in a healthcare organization’s journey toward modernizing the care it provides.

 

Legacy System Migration and Modern Care

There are several inciting events that can kick-start a migration project. For example, perhaps your organization recently acquired a group of physician practices with the goal of increasing patient access and generating new revenue. To maximize the success of this acquisition, an EHR conversion may be necessary. Or perhaps you’re switching EHRs because you want to provide a better telehealth platform and advanced patient engagement tools. Regardless of the reason, the need for projects like EHR migration and gathering patient-level information into one unified database is paramount.

Data is at the heart of care and operations, and it can be stored on highly disparate systems, whether you’re talking about patient medical records, financial data, images (e.g., x-rays, ultrasounds, and scanned documents), or other information that may be critical for performance improvements. Legacy system migration, including EHR migration, is the only way to ensure that everyone has the most up-to-date information on patients, treatments, and staff.

 

How Data Center Migration Gives You a Competitive Edge

When upgrading or implementing a new system as part of your modernization strategy, you’ll need a clear plan for data migration. Without one, you’ll undoubtedly undermine your efforts and may even fail to achieve your desired return on investment for any new or upgraded technology.

Data center migration is an important part of any modernization strategy because it:

1. Allows you to leverage advanced data analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence. When historical data continues to reside in legacy systems, that data is difficult to incorporate into new and emerging analytics tools that provide insights your organization can use to make data-driven decisions. Legacy system migration ensures data from disparate systems is all in one place for easier analysis. In addition, the greater the volume of data your organization can analyze, the more accurate the conclusions it can draw. Historical data provides context for understanding current trends, but only with the help of data migration.
2. Supports data accessibility. Data migration prevents users from having to log into multiple systems to access the data. In addition, cloud migration provides secure accessibility from a variety of devices such as mobile phones, laptops, or wearable devices. In healthcare, time is money, and even seconds matter when lives are at stake. Fast and easy access to data supports critical workflow efficiencies that improve overall performance. A lack of access offsets any productivity gained through new technology. Data accessibility is necessary for modern, value-based care.
3. Promotes data interoperability. Migrating legacy data to a new, interoperable system means healthcare organizations can, in turn, exchange that data with a variety of other external entities or incorporate it more seamlessly into medical solutions and technologies within the health system’s own quickly expanding ecosystem (e.g., laboratory information systems, telehealth platforms, remote patient monitoring devices, and internet of things devices). Without data migration, interoperable exchange is costly and perhaps even impossible in some cases. Efforts to leverage new technologies are also limited. Data interoperability supports a modern care experience that promotes care coordination and patient engagement.
4. Simplifies the modernization of existing platforms and operating systems and increases data security. An aging infrastructure is highly problematic for today’s healthcare organizations, and migrating data out of legacy systems to more modern systems ensures a smooth transition while providing inherent protection against cyberattacks. That’s because legacy systems pose a significant cybersecurity threat. These antiquated systems are not built using the latest security tools and techniques, and they may not even function on the latest versions of operating systems. A breach can be financially devastating—with the average cost of a healthcare data breach nearly $11 million—and it can greatly harm an organization from a reputational perspective.Unfortunately, 35% of third-party breaches that occurred in 2023 affected healthcare organizations, overtaking all other sectors, and legacy systems are often the point of entry for bad actors. However, breached organizations were more likely to pass the cost off to consumers rather than invest more in security. Migrating data to new, updated systems ensures organizations operate in a modern and secure environment, particularly when paired with a legacy system decommissioning strategy.
5. Drives cost savings. Organizations are continually looking for ways to offset the cost of new technology. Data migration is helpful because it eliminates the need to continue maintaining legacy systems, for which organizations often pay a monthly licensing fee. With data migration, organizations also avoid costs related to updating legacy systems and costs associated with lost productivity due to slower hardware. Eighty-five percent of organizations that have archived and retired legacy systems report positive financial results. Organizations can reinvest these cost savings into modern care tools and additional staff.

 

Choose a Partner That Meets Your Migration Needs

Leveraging new technology is an important part of modernizing a healthcare organization. It can help you achieve data completeness and consistency, ensure data integrity, facilitate scalability, strengthen data safeguarding, assure data consolidation, and more. But it’s not as simple as “plug and play.” Legacy systems hold a significant volume of patient data that’s necessary to access and use. That’s why data migration is so important. Leaving that data in legacy systems is not the answer. Learn more about Olah™, Verisma’s simple, fast, and complete solution to data archiving, and how it can streamline your data migration plans.