GE Exits EMR Market; Trigger to Archive Health Data

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In the midst of a growing hospital EMR market, GE Healthcare plans to leave the arena that is dominated by a few large vendors.

At the April HIMSS15 conference in Chicago, the company confirmed its plans to phase out its Centricity Enterprise product, the acute-care focused EMR. Jon Zimmerman, general manager of clinical business solutions at GE Healthcare, told MedCity News that the company will help customers transition to “a solid and effective acute-care EMR.”

GE Healthcare has not decided if it will sell the Centricity Enterprise line or help customers transition to vendors of their choice, according to the MedCity News report.

What does this mean for GE Centricity Enterprise EMR Users?

As existing GE Centricity Enterprise EMR users replace their system with something new, they will be faced with how to manage legacy patient data.  As a general rule, a system-wide EMR conversion is too costly and complex. While demographics and perhaps some key clinical data may be migrated to a new system, long-term storage of the volumes of other data points and financial line items must be addressed for these sites to comply with medical record retention regulations. With GE exiting this market space, counting on them as a support vendor by leaving the system up and running in read-only mode might be risky.

Health Data Archiver offers access to historical patient records

Harmony Healthcare IT’s Health Data Archiver offers a cost effective solution to migrate legacy data sources into a single, secure archive that typically results in a complete ROI within 18-24 months of decommissioning the legacy system. Data would be extracted from GE Centricity and made accessible in an easy-to-use, browser-based viewer for years to come. An option with this solution is to make CCD/CDA summaries of historical clinical data available to systems like Epic, Cerner and other major acute care EMR market vendors.  Another option is to migrate as much clinical data into the go-forward system as the new vendor will allow.  Harmony Healthcare IT specializes in clinical and financial data migration from one EMR to another.

With the consolidation of EMR providers and go-forward systems, as well as data management regulatory requirements, it is important to build a solid archiving solution into the mix.

Visit our website for more info on the HealthData Archiver™.

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May 13 2015

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