When we start purchasing our EHR, many times we don’t spend enough time thinking about what happens when we reach the end of life for the software we’re purchasing. I was particularly reminded of this when writing my post about the legacy EHR ticking time bombs. During our EHR or other healthcare IT software purchase, we don’t think about 5, 10, 15 years down the road when we might want to switch systems. What happens at the end of a system’s life is not our concern during an EHR purchase, but it should be.
A lot of people like to talk about EHR data portability. This is a very important subject when you’re looking to sunset an old system. However, if you haven’t put the right items in your EHR contract, it becomes a major issue for you to get that data out of the EHR. If you haven’t read the section on EHR contracts in my now somewhat dated EMR selection e-Book, take some time to read it over and check out your EHR contract.
When you can’t get the data out of your EHR, then you’re stuck in a situation that I described in my legacy EHR ticking time bomb post. You limp your legacy EHR system along and have issues with updates, fear the lost of the system completely, and much more. It’s just an ugly situation.
It’s nice to think that an EHR system will just work forever, but technology changes. It’s just the reality of life. I’m interested to see if the concept of an EHR vendor neutral archive will really take off. That would be one major way to combat this. However, I think many are afraid of this option because it’s tough to preserve the granular data elements in the EHR. Plus, it takes a forward thinking CIO to be able to make the investment in it. Although I’ve met some that are doing just this.
What has your organization done to prepare for the day that you’ll sunset your EHR or other healthcare IT systems? Is this a concern for you? Or are you like some CIOs who figure that it will be someone else’s problem?
