The rising importance of data governance and archiving in healthcare

Storing and securing patient information has always been one of the toughest challenges for healthcare service providers. But with compliance regulations and competition, a number of other critical factors are springing that pushes the need for a more robust and cost-effective approach to archive healthcare data.

While approaching a transition to digitalization, Healthcare CIOs often find it a daunting process to identify where to mount. Especially, while managing their patient data. It’s completely expected. There are so many things to consider; the process, the strategy, the volume of data, compliance, governance, security, insights, appropriate tools, and also most importantly the cost factor. Finding the first run is often considered as the most difficult part, but once you get hold of it, the rest is smooth.

As the world has seen a significant rise in global population and more specifically aging population, the demand and need for world-class healthcare service are also growing briskly. With this, the need to archive the resulting data is also swelling. Healthcare service providers deal with a huge volume of patient records, prescriptions, reports, and complex diagnostic information; they continue to generate more and more data on a daily basis. The challenge to provide world-class healthcare service is compounded by the development of new compliance requirements for patient data retention, protection, and accessibility in digital form. Other regulations force healthcare providers to guarantee the long-term retention, security, and immutability of patient data. But the biggest question is how many healthcare service providers have archiving solutions in place to cope up with this growing data volume and other challenges?

Sources of Salesforce data growth in Healthcare

Before archiving your healthcare data, you need to identify and understand various sources of data growth. Healthcare providers use various cloud platforms and solutions. There are copious healthcare service providers who use Salesforce CRM or platform to manage their service and patient data.

Health Cloud is being a revolution in the healthcare industry. This is being used widely by leading healthcare providers for better patient care management, access complete patient information, and deliver insightful & personalized patient care faster. Health Cloud generates a lot of data internally and you can’t control the source of data growth.

Beside this, there are various other common sources of Salesforce data growth like events, activities, emails, live agents, chatter, communities, custom solutions, IoT, Pardot; that instigates data growth for healthcare providers. Even if a healthcare provider is not using Health Cloud, but using other Salesforce Clouds like Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Financial Cloud, or HR Solutions, the rate of internal data volume growth will be huge and quick.

There are various healthcare solutions like Veeva, Trackwise Digital, IQVIA (formerly known as IMS Health), healthcare providers use for patient care. Other than these there are many other healthcare solutions like Quality Management, Clinical Trails, Patient & Doctor Management, Contract Management who promote Salesforce data growth.

As the healthcare industry is highly regulated and it required data retention for many years. Healthcare providers have to follow CFR Part 11, HIPAA Standards. To comply with these standards, they create custom audit trails, workflow modules, and regulated report submission history. These modules generate a lot of data internally which often increase the data volume to a high extent.

Why do you need to archive?

If you are offering healthcare services and using the Salesforce platform, you must consider archiving your data, not just because of governance and compliance reasons, but also to reduce huge storage cost. You can’t control data growth, but with an efficient native archiving solution, you can manage your data by controlling and securing it. Below are few of the most crucial points for healthcare providers to start archiving their data.

Ensure Data Governance & Compliance

Data governance is the process to define standards, processes, technology, and tools which healthcare providers can rely upon to manage their patient data. A complete data governance strategy with the help of an archiving solution can fulfill regulatory requirements, ensure business continuity and enable access and retrieval of any data. Once you identify which data to store, you need to determine how long to store it. You can even archive different form of data for different period of time. For example, you can archive your patient details for 6 to 7 years, while your email records for 3 to 4 years. Keeping healthcare laws and regulations in mind, you can follow data governance policies by archiving your data.

To Save Capital & Operational Cost

Additional Salesforce storage cost is huge, and you can’t move your sensitive patient data out of the system putting data security in a toss. In order to store infrequently used data or past patient records, healthcare providers can opt for data archiving. With the right solution, less used data can be strategically archived and saved for future use. A significant amount of cost can be saved by archiving data.

Data Accessibility

There is no point in storing data if one can not access it whenever required. It is a tough task for traditional storage systems to cope up with the modern day data needs. Gone are the days of storing historical patient printouts in a binder or inactive medical charts in a basement or storage unit. Archiving solutions can offer instant data accessibility and availability by scanning medical reports, data, images etc. Healthcare providers need instant access to patient data at the touch of a button.

Minimizing Risk

Healthcare industry is data sensitive. As they deal with a large volume of sensitive patient data which traditional storage systems carry, might become more prone to data corruption or loss with age. Archiving patient data or any other data with the use of a scalable and simple solution can ensure long-term access to the right information.

DataArchiva: Healthcare Industry’s Silent Partner

Healthcare providers need a simple yet robust archiving solution which can archive their data by efficiently addressing other factors like compliance, cost, security, scalability and data accessibility. Labeling all these needs, DataArchiva which is a Salesforce native structured data archiving solution is helping the healthcare industry by periodically archiving less used data (historical data). Perfecting meeting healthcare industry regulations, DataArchiva offers significant storage cost reduction (up to 80% cost saving), compliance and governance, lower regulatory violation risk, ready to use healthcare industry template, performance enhancement, prediction and analytics on archived data, instant data accessibility, and low to zero maintenance cost.

As data is the new oil in the healthcare industry, you need to keep data in order to derive more insights from it as well as to meet regulatory compliance. However, a larger trove of data comes at a greater price, and Salesforce data incurs plenty. This is why DataArchiva with the power of Big Object was developed. Recently being listed in Gartner’s Market Guide for Structured Data Archiving Solutions, DataArchiva is being designed to work with US Government Cloud and Salesforce Shield. With a potential to manage the huge volume of healthcare data efficiently, DataArchiva offers a simple, scalable, and affordable solution to healthcare service providers. Because of its Salesforce native capabilities, sensitive patient data will be highly secured as it won’t go out of Salesforce Org. While supporting GDPR, Lightning UI & Lightning Connect, and Einstein Analytics; DataArchiva is the first choice data archiving solution for various healthcare service providers.

For the healthcare industry, a solid data governance policy coupled with DataArchiva can reduce storage costs, help enforce data retention policies, create a comprehensive audit trail of all data, and facilitate data e-discovery. By integrating live data and archived data efficiently, DataArchiva helps healthcare service providers offer the best patient care management. Previously as data was used to be locked inside multiple systems, it was very irretrievable. Now with DataArchiva, the information is readily available and can significantly contribute to clinical research.

Final Words

As healthcare service providers have started using the Salesforce platform and Health Cloud more and more for a seamless patient care, it has become a challenging task for them to manage their data. DataArchiva which comes with robust features,  functionalities, 24*7 support team, and a five-star AppExchange rating is by far the #1 data archiving solution for the healthcare industry. In the ongoing life cycle of the electronic health record, it is no longer enough to prepare to go for an electronic mode. Don’t wait for the opportunity to simply react in the form of a regulatory violation or critical data loss or an OIG audit. Contact us today.

Are you coming to Dreamforce 2018? DataArchiva will be present at booth #1942. Don’t forget to visit us.

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DataArchiva is an enterprise data management application built for Salesforce that offers complete data management solutions including archive, backup, and seeding.