By Michael Pittroff, Archiving Specialist at Verisma
July 10, 2026
Among the top priorities during electronic health record (EHR) migration is ensuring legacy patient records are archived in a compliant and future-ready manner. Provider organizations should begin working with EHR vendors as soon as possible to get patient records.
According to Carmen Griffin, Vice President of Services at Verisma, “Planning delays can result in increased risk, because vendors may introduce complexities mid-project.”
Delays can also lead to increased cost for record acquisitions, as well as ongoing licensing and maintenance fees for the legacy system.
Verisma’s enterprise archiving solution, Olah™ expertly guides projects involving healthcare’s most highly regarded EHR vendors, including Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Meditech, and NextGen.
When Verisma’s recent clients decommissioned their instances of Epic, the vendor supplied exit records. Epic exported all patient records to a single PDF for each patient for delivery to the provider organization.
During an archiving project, Verisma stores the data in our secure cloud environment. With the Epic projects, the PDFs were then reformatted into structured query language (SQL) so each data element could be accessed discretely, rendering the patient records searchable and sortable.
We employ a lift-and-shift approach when transferring records, rather than relying on the traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) process.
When you’re using ETL, you must choose all the different pieces of data you want to come over. That adds a lot of time and cost.
With lift-and-shift, Verisma acquires a complete copy of the entire database and stores it in a dedicated instance of Amazon Web Services (AWS), provided exclusively for the client. Lift-and-shift future proofs the archive.
“During project scoping, it’s not uncommon for a client to overlook certain data elements they later realize are critical,” adds Griffin.
Verisma relies on its unique, and proprietary, process to make archived records as usable as possible. We:
- Brake out patient records originally delivered as a single PDF into multiple categories, for instance.
- Build report views on top of the data to support operational needs.
- Provide access to all archived data via a single patient-centric chart.
Health systems must know where to find, manage and protect all this legacy information. Staff will need to locate it to support continuity-of-care and comply with high priority release of information (ROI) requests. Verisma acts as the data steward to help clients access and handle this huge data set correctly.
Migrating away from Epic doesn’t eliminate the need for access to historical patient, financial and operational data. Learn how healthcare organizations can securely archive Epic records, reduce long-term system costs, maintain compliance, and preserve access to critical information without keeping a legacy environment in place in our Archiving Epic Data white paper.
