The trend of hospitals acquiring physician practices, which began picking up steam in 2012, is continuing at a steady rate five years later. In nearly all acquisitions, the hospital wants the new entity to adopt its EMR and other systems which begs the question, what becomes of the ‘no-longer-needed,’ such as the incumbent ambulatory EMR within the physician practice? This is an important question that needs to be addressed during the acquisition process as these older EMRs contain valuable patient data that, must remain accessible to physicians and be maintained for care and regulatory requirements.
To shed some light on the answer to this pressing question, our very own Tim Kaschinske, Senior Product Manager, North America wrote a feature article for Becker’s Hospital Review in which he explores how one emerging technology that can help hospitals retire unnecessary or legacy technology systems while realizing cost savings is the independent clinical archive (ICA), a vendor-neutral repository of patient data stored in a common format. Read Kaschinske’s complete article on how an ICA can help hospitals retain important data from acquired EMRs in a cost-effective manner and still make the information accessible while greatly reducing the number of systems that physicians need to access for patient information.
