Legacy data: In April of 2015, Partners HealthCare (now Mass General Brigham) began transitioning to a new electronic health record (EHR) platform, now called Digital Health eCare. A limited amount of data from existing applications was copied over to the eCare Epic EHR, while older information remained available only through the legacy applications. Support for this legacy data continues to be required for the duration of the legal retention period. Many Mass General Brigham institutions still store legacy data in the systems that were replaced by eCare. The need to move that data may be driven by the cost or discontinuation of support for the legacy system.
Mass General Brigham policy: In the time since eCare was implemented, enterprise Health Information Management (HIM) has drawn on lessons learned to develop an enterprise-wide policy for archiving records, information, and data. This policy has been reviewed and approved by all of the Mass General Brigham sites, and is available on Policy Central and at this link: Archiving Records, Information and Data.
The archiving policy sets up standards for data retention and archiving across all Mass General Brigham sites. It establishes a set of preferred archiving solutions, with the purpose of storing and providing user access to the data for clinical, revenue cycle, health information management, and legal/compliance purposes, in a format suitable to the needs of retention policy.
Data types: Be aware of the different types of data affected by policy and legal requirements for retention. These include:
Retention assessment: Before starting the archiving process, assess whether retention is needed, and if so, whether the data should be archived or retained in the legacy system. Determination is based on the type of data, and its required retention period, and the possibility of a legal hold being placed, as well as the ownership of the information.
Archiving process: If a site determines that legacy data should be retained, they must adhere to Mass General Brigham archiving policy to select a solution. The Mass General Brigham Archiving Workgroup developed a process to determine which of the preferred solutions would best suit the needs of the site and enterprise. The initial step is to complete the Archiving considerations questionnaire and submit it to the archiving advisory team. The advisory team determines which archiving option in current use would be the best fit for the site, based on the information received, and makes the recommendation to the site. If there is no obvious solution, the advisory team escalates the review to the Archiving Workgroup. If needed, the question is further escalated to the full Archiving Steering Committee.
Once an archiving solution is selected, the project for transitioning is added to the archive inventory. Responsibility for overseeing the process depends on the archiving solution selected; at a minimum, the enterprise archiving team must be included in the assessment and kept informed of status, particularly where centralized HIM release of information (ROI) is involved. The process includes development of a project timeline and oversight of vendor contracting and all aspects of the technical environment for maintaining and operating the archiving solution. See Archiving oversight. Site resources are needed to facilitate archiving of a core legacy application. See Site Resource Requirements.