Healthcare Data Migration: Implementation Challenges and Solutions

The healthcare industry generates 30% of the global data volume and will keep growing in future years. By 2025, the compound annual growth rate will reach 36%, surpassing manufacturing, media & entertainment, and finances.

These numbers show the impact of healthcare data and explain why medical data migration is essential for most organizations. Migration enables providers to scale their practices, run IT analytics, and adopt more robust systems.

How does data migration in healthcare happen? Keep reading to find out.

This article highlights healthcare data migration best practices, processes, and tools.

What is data migration in healthcare?

Healthcare data migration is moving information about patients and the provided services from one storage to another. It often overlaps with EHR data migration since most providers manage patient records through EHR software.

Electronic Health Records (EHR) is a system that stores information about patients, their medical history, treatment, insurance, billing , and other details in a single location. It's a highly effective software solution that still tends to become outdated after some time. For example, a hospital may need to increase its capacity, strengthen data security, meet new regulatory requirements, adopt advanced analytics, etc. All these goals may involve legacy system data migration.

5 Stages of the healthcare data migration process

The healthcare data migration process includes extracting, translating, and loading data from a legacy archive to a destination archive. Even though moving data between sources may seem simple, it's a multi-stage and time-consuming procedure. Here are the main stages you will need to go through:

1. Assessment

The first step is understanding where you currently stand to develop a migration strategy. You need to check all your systems with electronic and paper-based patient data to get the big picture. Once you have it, you can estimate which records to migrate and decide what tools can handle it.

You may decide to hire a tech partner for EHR system integration and migration at this point and during the following steps. A qualified tech company can develop a strategy for you and carry out the transition by adopting healthcare data migration best practices.

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2. Data cleanup

There is no point in migrating misformatted or inaccurate data to have it circulating in your system. You must ensure only clean information remains by identifying records with mistakes, duplicates, or unnecessary details.

3. Structuring

Cleaned data is free of errors but still heterogeneous. Thus, you need to structure and classify your records. It will enable you to better segment and manage them after migration.

4. Conversion

Healthcare platforms usually work with a particular data format and have specific requirements. That's why you need to convert the legacy records into the necessary format for a smooth migration. At this point, ensuring all records are converted, and you haven't lost anything is critical.

5. Migration

When records are structured and formatted, you can move them to the necessary storage. It's essential to go piece by piece to import all data. Overall, migration speed depends on the data volume, source and final location, system requirements, and data migration tools.

Major types of healthcare data migration tools

Healthcare providers and business partners use several kinds of medical data migration solutions to move records. The choice depends on the volume and quality of data to relocate, budget, and strategy. Below are the most common options:

Self-scripted

Organizations with a small volume of clean and well-structured data may do with self-scripted tools. These healthcare data migration solutions are a simple piece of code that runs several processes intended to move records. Choosing this option, you should mind that this is the least secure approach, and you will need an internal tech team to implement it.

On-premise

Fivetran, IBM InfoSphere, RI NextForm, and Microsoft SQL are the most popular on-premise data migration systems. So when should you use them?

These and other on-premise solutions are recommended for relocating data after an organization's acquisition or merger since records are transferred within the same enterprise. It also may be the only option if you cannot use cloud services because of local regulatory requirements. Other than that, cloud services are the best option.

Cloud solutions

Cloud is an optimum choice for most healthcare providers, with AWS Data Migration Service, Google Cloud VMware engine, Carbonite, and StarfishETL as leading tools.

Migration to the cloud enables you to convert massive data volumes automatically, ensures backups, and eliminates the need to maintain expensive in-house hardware. As a result, your data management operations become faster and more cost-effective. The only thing to mind when choosing cloud tools is compliance with HIPAA and other healthcare data processing regulations.

Healthcare data migration challenges to be ready for

Moving records of a whole organization is never easy. Yet knowing the medical data migration challenges beforehand, you can prepare for these pitfalls to avoid them or minimize the risks. So be sure to remember these common data migration issues while moving medical records.

In-depth planning

Creating a roadmap for health data migration takes effort and may be challenging to complete if you have never done it before. Still, you shouldn't start moving records without careful planning. The lack of a plan has far-reaching negative consequences, including:

• Bad scope definition. You don't know the volume of information in your organization and, therefore, don't realize how much time and resources migration will take.
• Inaccurate budget. You cannot be sure whether your current budget is enough to move the necessary records and may face unexpected expenses.
• Wrong choice of tools. Without knowing your data migration requirements from the start, you cannot pick the most suitable data migration solutions.
• Data duplicates or alterations. When data distribution is poorly planned, the risk of duplicates or distorted information grows.
• Non-compliance with regulations. You become more prone to adopting illegal data processing practices if you don't analyze applicable regulatory requirements before transferring records.
• Increased costs. You may be forced to fix data migration inaccuracies later and invest additional money.

Data interoperability

Interoperability is one of the main challenges of healthcare data migration since medical records are heterogeneous. Multiple tools generate them in versatile formats that may be incompatible. Hence, if you want to move data to a more advanced system and use it for analytics and automation, you will have to ensure data interoperability. It requires the knowledge of interoperability standards such as HL7 FHIR and USCDI and skills to achieve smooth data exchange between system components through APIs.

Regulatory compliance

Besides HL7 FHIR and USCDI standards mentioned above, anyone managing healthcare data must comply with HIPAA, HITECH Act, CCPA, and many other regulations. By the way, earlier we reviewed a detailed explanation of FHiR. Although you may have achieved compliance. Although you may have achieved compliance in your legacy systems, transition to new software always involves the review of regulatory requirements. Thus, you will need to check whether your new data processing practices comply with the law again..

Binariks' solutions for healthcare data migration and best practices

Here are some healthcare data migration best practices we follow and encourage you to adopt:

Create a healthcare data migration strategy

Always estimate your current data management approach and available resources to develop an optimum strategy for moving data.

Consider hybrid solutions

If you need to quickly obtain additional computing and storage resources, consider augmenting your on-premise storage with the cloud. Apart from increased capabilities, it also allows you to comply with healthcare regulations more easily. While sensitive data is stored on in-house servers, most patients' records are kept and managed in the cloud.

Understand how open APIs benefit modern medical work

Simplify EMR data migration and achieve interoperability of the moved components with the help of APIs. This technology enables healthcare providers to manage large volumes of versatile data effectively and securely.

Carefully discuss disaster recovery steps with vendors

Be ready for force majeure situations long before they happen. Communicate with vendors on how to act in case something disrupts your business operations, like data leakage.

Hire workers having skills to manage patient data in the cloud and train personnel

Innovations should always go with personnel training. You must train team members on using new systems and hire in-house specialists to manage cloud software.

Consider Binariks as a provider of healthcare data migration solutions

The easiest way to handle healthcare data migration problems is to find a technology provider with relevant expertise. As a company with a strong focus on healthcare software, Binariks is the top option to consider.

We specialize in healthcare software migration and have already completed multiple projects, including consulting and FHIR implementation for a healthcare platform, healthcare software migration to AWS , and others .

Being a Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud partner, we can help you migrate your system to the cloud following the best industry practices. Binariks also offers custom healthcare software development services should you need to design a healthcare app from scratch.