Medical Manager Software Retirement

Protecting PHI: Is Your Practice at Risk?

Medical practices migrating off of Medical Manager® software may be at risk. That old system contains individually-identifiable protected health information (PHI) that, according to state and federal mandates, must be secured and archived for 7-10 years. Maintaining a system for that long may entail support costs and corruption issues with an aging operating system and server.

Securely Archiving PHI

HealthData Archiver® securely stores decades-worth of patient data from retired healthcare applications or from scanned paper charts. First, the full practice management database -- not just demographics or balance forward financials -- is extracted. Next, copies of any old paper charts are optionally scanned. Finally, all data and images are indexed and made searchable by patient identifier, name, social security number and date of birth.

The HealthData Archival Process

Data Archive vs. Data Conversion

There is a general misperception that a data conversion from one system to another brings over ALL the data. However, due to cost and complexity, only patient demographics are often converted to a new system. In many cases, account balances are also carried over. Rarely, however, is full line item financial, procedure and diagnosis history included in a system conversion -- much less appointment history, collection notes, comments or images that all make up the full history of the patient data.

The main difference between an archive and a conversion is data volume. As shown in the table below, an archive includes most if not all of the data in its full integrity. This all-inclusive long-term storage of data and images better equips the practice in the case of audit or legal suits and adheres to state and federal medical record retention regulations for protected health information (PHI).