The Sticker Shock In Changing Ehrs

By Author: Triyam Inc
Total Articles: 26
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Many of you may have already heard of (or unfortunately experienced first hand) the sticker shock when you implement a new EHR. Unfortunately the bad news does not stop with just setting up the new system. Once the new EHR is implemented, try asking the vendor to share their data with your other systems like PACS, Lab, Health Information Exchange etc. The EHR vendor will ask you to pay thousands of dollars more for each data exchange. Arthur Allen, editor of eHealth at Politico recently reported that ‘The vendors of the health care software want thousands of dollars to unlock the data so they can be shared’ (Read more )

The same is the case for converting your historical medical and financial records too – here’s how. The squeaky-clean new EHR system does not have all the historical medical records present in the old EHR. You may vividly recollect the sales guy of the new EHR telling you that ‘we will migrate all your data to the new system’. Try calling him about that promise, after you made the purchase. He or she would ‘clarify’ that what he really meant was the patient demographics and not all medical ...
... records like allergies, orders, medications etc,; not even all the financials like charges, claims, statements etc. When you tell him that the state requires your facility to maintain at least 5 years of history; the sales guy would tell you that they would be happy to do the entire conversion for a additional price. (See how many years of data your state mandates to maintain here ). You bite the bullet and get management approval for this additional cost.

You would think you have heard the last of all price tags, wait till the data conversion project gets kicked off. The legacy EHR vendor whose system you just replaced, sees one last opportunity to give you a departing blow. This outgoing vendor wants you to pay up for releasing the historical data stored in their application. ‘But the data belongs to the facility’ you would argue….good luck with that.

This is what we at Triyam call the ‘two sides of historical data conversion‘. At Triyam, we can extract your historical data from the legacy EHR system without any help from the EHR vendor. The extracted data can be migrated to the new EHR or can be simply archived into Triyam’s own archival software Fovea. The facility need not pay two vendors for this conversion and once archived, the facility can stop paying the old EHR vendor for annual support and shut down their system for good. Contact us to learn more.

Triyam is a leading provider of EMR/EHR data management solutions company in USA, with a specific focus on legacy data archival and retention. Contact us for EHR Replacement & Legacy EHR Data Conversion.