There’s no doubt about it. The healthcare industry produces an enormous amount of data. The US healthcare alone reached 150 exabytes of data in 2011 and hit 2,000 exabytes in 2020! When it comes to data management, volume is just one of the challenges facing healthcare organizations.
Legacy data is another.
When transitioning to a new Health Information System (HIS), not all data migrates to the new application. The data that remains – this legacy data – creates a number of concerns, ranging from data governance and regulatory compliance to security. Leaving legacy systems online merely to store the legacy data within them becomes hard to manage and expensive to maintain. For clinicians making decisions at the point of care, accessing this legacy data can prove to be difficult, negatively impacting both the patient experience and patient safety.
MediQuant: Your One-Stop Shop for Data Management
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Northeast Ohio, MediQuant offers hospitals and health systems complete in-house data management services, from data extraction and migration to data conversion and archiving.
“MediQuant has over 20 years of experience working with large health systems on data archiving, migration, and conversion service engagements,” said Tony Paparella, Founder & Board Chair, MediQuant. “We have extensive experience in healthcare software development, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), clinical services, data management, and other specialties.”
MediQuant offers data transition management, interoperable active archiving, comprehensive data life cycle management technology, and medical necessity data software solutions. Additionally, MediQuant offers a number of services to support its suite of software products, including:
Data Archiving Services: This team prepares, maps, and loads full data sets into a new archive solution, validating its accuracy twice. With the help of embedded machine-learning-enhanced robotic processing automation, MediQuant offers referential matching capabilities to support customers’ “one patient, one record” strategy.
Data Migration Services: MediQuant provides data migration services for electronic medical records (EMR), electronic health records (EHR), and other medical patient data to ensure compliance regulations and maintain critical health records in one centralized system. MediQuant provides a complete patient and employee data extraction resource to pull discrete and non-discrete data.
Data Conversion Services: MediQuant enables companies requiring specific data conversion and other technical services to manage transitions between legacy and go-forward EMR systems. MediQuant provides tailored data conversion strategies for physician practice groups or ambulatory organizations performing system replacements and strategic data stewardship planning to large healthcare systems seeking an enterprise data archive solution.
MediQuant can help Large Acute Health Systems and Hospitals with Active Data Archiving
DataArk®: MediQuant's flagship product assists hospitals in retiring legacy clinical and patient accounting platforms and maintaining access to data via a cloud-based software platform. The solutions also offer patient matching capabilities through ArchiveMPI™ as well as enhanced reporting functionality through ArchiveInsights™.
"By providing users the ability to access and work with relevant legacy data, DataArk offers the functionality of a legacy system without the security risks and added expense of operating both new and legacy systems in parallel – resulting in up to 80 percent in annual savings," adds Tony.
OpenArk™: This solution empowers healthcare organizations to decommission legacy systems and continue to meet data retention requirements by migrating valuable but infrequently accessed legacy healthcare data. OpenArk stores all data in its original format and leverages the organization’s reporting tools and other applications, fueling analytics, compliance, Release of Information, and research.
CriticalAccessArchive™: This is a newer offering from MediQuant that is specially designed for critical access hospitals (CAHs) and features a streamlined process for system transition and data migration to a secure, centralized archive.
MediQuant also helps ambulatory and physician practice groups archive data with:
CommunityArchive®: This is a streamlined, cost-effective package for ambulatory sites and physician practices to extract, convert and archive legacy data in ambulatory electronic medical records (AEMRs) and practice management systems for faster implementation at a low price point.
PatientArchive: This vendor-neutral archive solution for accessing electronic medical records from legacy AEMRs offers users full search, print, and export capabilities from an easy-to-use web-based interface.
"Active archiving grants users the necessary functionality of a legacy system without the expense and risks. Data is kept active for quickly retrieving files, easily updating old records, and continuing to bill accounts. MediQuant serves more than 200 individual health systems which represent more than 1,200 hospital and physician practice customers," said Jim Jacobs, CEO, and President, MediQuant.
MediQuant Helps Yale-New Haven Health to Transition Five EHRs to One and Achieve a Single, Simplified View of Patient Data
Yale-New Haven Health, a provider of comprehensive, integrated, and family-focused care, has more than 100 medical specialties and over 6,685 university and community physicians and advanced practitioners. Like many health systems nationwide, Yale-New Haven decided to eliminate the budgetary waste associated with maintaining multiple applications. Doctors, nurses, and staff require frequent access to archived data to understand patients’ full medical history. But navigating multiple systems to find that data was time-consuming, and the staff was required to switch through multiple screens.
The health system also needed a solution for small ambulatory practices that would allow them to meet regulatory requirements and release only the required data for compliance requests.
Yale-New Haven Health was introduced to the MediQuant DataArk product, which created an easy user interface that integrated with the electronic health record for simplified access to clinical data.
Keeping patient history data easily accessible to clinical staff was essential. “We asked ourselves if we needed the active archive or if just keeping the data available in some legacy server somewhere would be adequate,” Stump said. “That’s where clinical data drove the answer – not losing that patient history. We had experienced a real example in our institution where challenges in accessing that historical data interfered with the best outcome for a patient,” said Lisa Stump, senior vice president, and CIO at Yale-New Haven Health
MediQuant collaborated with Yale-New Haven Health to transition five EHRs to one and achieve a single, simplified view of patient data. The health system is now completing a conversion for its small ambulatory care practices after experiencing significant cost savings – $2.6 million annually – and improved data accessibility with the first project.
MediQuant: Leadership Team
Tony Paparella, Founder & Board Chair
Tony established MediQuant in 1999, recruiting top programmers in data management to help him develop what would become the industry standard for active archiving, DataArk. While Tony's initial goal was to provide innovative, dependable revenue cycle technology to the healthcare market, the company has widened its scope since its early days to deliver clinical and ERP archive solutions. He led the company until September 2018.
Jim Jacobs, CEO, and President
Jim Jacobs has been CEO and President of MediQuant since September 2018. Jim’s relationship with the company began in 2015 as a consultant to Founder, former CEO, and current Board Chair Tony Paparella. He joined the staff as Chief Operations Officer and has since led several acquisitions and alliances to drive new capabilities in data archiving, migration and conversion.
Shelly Disser, Vice President, Solution Delivery & Client Advocacy
Shelly Disser has more than 20 years of experience developing strategies, methodologies, and processes to enable health enterprises to efficiently archive, manage and activate legacy data. She founded one of the first data archiving companies for the health sector, competing solely with MediQuant.
David Lamar, Chief Growth Officer
Dave joined MediQuant in 2017 as the firm invested in driving customer growth to match its innovation. He has been a leading sales and marketing executive, with a 25-year career providing hospitals and healthcare professionals with financial and care solutions, including Patient Matters, Axway Corporation, OptumInsight, and Eclipsys (a part of Allscripts).
Kel Pults, DHA, MSN, RN, Chief Clinical Officer
Kel applies her nursing experience, Doctor of Health Administration degree, and deep expertise to build effective health information technology that supports clinical data management solutions. Kel assumed her current post in 2018 as part of MediQuant’s commitment to building its support for clinical data management services.
Future Outlook
MediQuant has been growing its offerings through strategic acquisitions, partnerships, and hires. It acquired DataEmerge, a leading data extraction service and long-time partner, and HeF Solutions, a healthcare technology firm specializing in EMR data conversions and legacy data archival and technical services.
It also partners with top-tier software vendors and consultants who complement their health IT offerings with MediQuant’s technology and expertise in archiving, management, and activation of legacy data. The company welcomed 32 new hires in the first half of 2020, including five registered nurses, to expand its clinical experience and expertise.
“Our objective is to provide superior service and expand the access to and use of legacy data. We are investing in developing technology that enables/simplifies system transitions and accelerates and expands access to and the value of legacy data. We believe there is power in unlocking the potential of data to drive insights, leading to better care and thereby helping millions of people live happier and healthier lives,” concluded Jim.