Moving your healthcare organization from a legacy electronic health record (EHR) system to a modern one like Epic is a momentous undertaking that should dramatically improve your operational efficiency and patient care. But the stakes are high in such a technology transition.

If you overlook data integrity — or don’t prioritize it the way you should — your organization may compromise patient safety, risk non-compliance, fail to see expected return on investment, and more. A modern EHR will streamline workflows and improve patient satisfaction but only with complete, accurate, structured data.

Here we’ll reveal the data integrity challenges you might face in your EHR migration and how to preemptively address them to see a successful transition.

Why Data Integrity Matters in EHR Migrations

Preserving data integrity as you move patient records from one EHR system to another is critical to mitigate security risks, stay compliant, and ensure clinician efficiency. Data needs to make it to your new system with accuracy and consistency in order to be fully usable for clinical and operational needs.

Incomplete, inaccurate, or missing records may jeopardize patient safety. Consider the consequences of having inaccurate allergy records or an incomplete list of medications. Clinicians might make decisions that negatively affect patient health if they aren’t equipped with full records. And if clinicians need to go find missing data during a patient appointment, that appointment may be protracted — bottlenecking operations.

Ultimately, without data integrity, your new EHR won’t deliver the outcomes your organization hopes to achieve by implementing it.

The Data Challenge and How to Address It With Medical Data Abstraction

Legacy EHR systems often house chaotic data environments that contain:

• Duplicated or outdated records
• Records strewn across facilities
• Unstructured notes and data that are difficult to standardize
• Inconsistent coding

If you operate a bigger organization with large volumes of records, these factors make for an even more daunting problem. Organizing, evaluating, standardizing, and migrating data from such an environment is an overwhelming task for internal teams that have plates full of other daily responsibilities.

That’s where medical data abstraction services from an expert provider come in — especially for organizations managing millions of charts.

Medical data abstraction is the process of reviewing, extracting, standardizing, moving, and validating data in such a way that converted records retain integrity in your new EHR system. Done correctly, abstraction ensures patient charts are complete and accurate — and available on time.

An abstraction provider should examine your data environment, make a plan for migrating your data, and govern the process so data arrives structured and usable in your new EHR. Organizations commonly think they can hand off abstraction to internal teams, only to discover:

• Abstraction is such a big job that it requires paying employees overtime to do.
• Even if staff is willing to work overtime, they may experience burnout from the process.
• Employees may lack the expertise and experience to evaluate what data should migrate
  across what type of timeline.
• Manually evaluating millions of patient charts is simply not doable without software or
  external help.
• Ensuring data integrity requires resources and reporting capabilities the organization
  simply doesn’t have.

Vendor-supported abstraction delivers:

• Teams of experienced abstractors with medical and healthcare backgrounds.
• Clear roadmaps for getting patient records to the new system on time.
• Measurable objectives for ensuring data integrity through quality assurance, validation
  processes, and reporting.

It may be that your organization can perform some abstraction processes in-house while a vendor can do other, more complicated tasks. The right provider will advise you honestly on how much you can take on yourself to stay within budget and on your designated timeline.

Prioritize Data Integrity Through Abstraction for a Successful EHR Migration

EHR transitions succeed or fail based on the integrity of the data that lands in the new system. By doing medical data abstraction right, organizations properly move patient records to their new EHR with the completeness and accuracy required for clinicians to deliver stellar patient experiences.

Don’t leave data integrity to chance. GuideIT’s abstractors have 30+ years of experience migrating medical data for healthcare organizations. We offer a free assessment of your data environment to give you expert guidance on how to preserve data integrity and see through a successful migration. Schedule your free session today.