By Jamie Clifton – Vice President Product & Technical Solutions, BridgeHead Software

Legacy applications: if your healthcare organization is like most, you have a lot of them.

You may not use them in production, or even access them much, but you probably still spend a lot of time and money on them. Especially when you consider:

  • Licensing and maintenance
  • Storage and backup
  • Power and cooling
  • Data center floor space
  • Training people on how to use the applications—just in case

It adds up to a significant budget item, especially for something you rarely, if ever, use. And at a time when budgets are tight and IT departments are expected to do more with less.

You must keep these applications up and running. They contain patient data that you might need to access at some point, and there may be regulatory and compliance requirements as well. It’s likely you also have repositories of legacy data on file shares.

It’s becoming an enormous problem. Healthcare industry analysts believe that hospital IT departments spend about 75 percent of their time maintaining these legacy applications and data. In fact, some healthcare facilities estimate that they spend more money on legacy application licensing costs than they do on IT wages. Wherever you work, it’s safe to assume you are spending a lot more than you should in support of these healthcare applications.

IT departments are not purposely ignoring this issue, but extracting and migrating data from legacy applications is complex. And it’s likely you either don’t have that expertise in house or can’t spare those experts. The other issue is where to put all that patient-related data. Even if you could extract it, where can you store it so it’s secure and accessible by those who need it, when they need it?

You may feel like it’s just easier to leave it where it is. But the problem is only going get worse, costing your healthcare organization more every year if you don’t deal with it.

That’s where we come in. We’re BridgeHead Software. We specialize in data management for healthcare and have developed innovative solutions for migrating data from legacy healthcare applications.

Our independent clinical archive, HealthStore®, provides a safe, secure, cost-efficient repository for all your patient-related data. We also offer a complete set of software tools to help you easily migrate data from your legacy applications and archive files—no matter where they reside today.

BridgeHead gives you the ability to extract and migrate patient data from the vast majority of legacy applications you have in your facility, regardless of standards, formats or hardware.

For standards-based applications, BridgeHead has tools to migrate content from DICOM, HL7 and XDS applications, as well as unstructured file repositories. We also have a suite of migration tools to profile and extract content from any non-standards-based applications. Whether it’s desktop, web or console-based, we have software to profile the way a customer would interact with the application and generate data as a user would. The data can then be converted to an agreed standard, to ensure that it’s of good clinical quality, and placed alongside related content in our independent clinical archive.

With HealthStore, you can consolidate all the patient-related data you have on your legacy applications and file systems into a safe, secure, easy-to-access archive. By doing so, you’ll eliminate unnecessary costs such as license and maintenance fees, as well as the cost of hardware, power and cooling, data-center floor space, and training.

You can put those dollars toward improving your healthcare organization’s IT systems to support easier, more secure information access and improved patient outcomes.