3 Ways to Improve Collaboration Between a Data Archival Vendor and Your Health System

The relationship that your health system shares with the archive vendors is as crucial a process as health data archival itself. A good collaboration between your health system and data archival vendor will ensure that the outcomes are better and the archiving workflow is more efficient. Time and again, EHR upgrades and archiving processes can throw in a lot of challenges, yet choosing the right archive vendor for your organization and maintaining that collaboration can help overcome those challenges.

Through this article, you will be able to explore the 3 ways of improving collaboration between your health system and your health data archive vendor. They are:

• Health Data Archive Vendors Must be Aware of the Archival Challenges in Your Health System
• Health Organizations Must Ensure That Their Archive Vendors Follow the Healthcare Regulation Standards
• Health Organizations Must Work on Removing Barriers in Organizational Culture and Encouraging Transparency

Health Data Archive Vendors Must be Aware of the Archival Challenges in Your Health System

There are several challenges that your healthcare organization can face when it comes to dealing with EHR. Some of the common EHR challenges are:

• Data entry: The work process of a clinician might make it difficult for them to enter the desired EHR data appropriately. Once a list of information is entered into an EHR, the order in which they were entered might change. This can create issues later on as clinicians might retrieve the information in the wrong order.
• Interoperability: EHR information communication could be hindered due to inadequate interoperability within the same EHR components or between the EHR and other systems.
• Information availability: Sometimes, information that is clinically relevant is hindered because it is stored or entered in the wrong location or is otherwise inaccessible in the EHR.
• Workflow support: Mismatch between the intent of the end-user and the EHR can create a hindrance to the EHR workflow. If the user is not entirely aware of how to operate the EHR due to reasons that could pertain to being a new recruit or new feature upgrades, he or she might miss out on some of the things while working. This can come in the way of several EHR operations and cause issues.
• Alerting challenges: Sometimes, the EHR alerts and other system feedback are incorrect, ambiguous, or totally absent. This can create issues as clinicians might miss out on important alerts that could be critical to the workflow.

It is important that your health system makes the archive vendors aware of the challenges that are particular to your organization. Gaining knowledge about the particularities would increase the vendor’s understanding and enhance their ability to overcome the challenges. This would further help in influencing a good partnership between your archive vendor and your organization.

Health Organizations Must Ensure That Their Archive Vendors Follow the Healthcare Regulation Standards and Requirements

Health organizations must make sure that they are choosing vendors who follow the necessary healthcare regulation standards like Cures Act, HIPAA, Hitech, and so on. They must also ensure that their archive vendor is fulfilling the essential secure archival needs. Some of the ways health organizations can ensure that they are choosing a secure archive vendor are:

• Whether the vendor is providing the required customer support through emails, on-call support, and others
• Whether the vendors are providing clear directions to the consumer regarding the archival process
• Whether the software that they are providing for archiving purposes follows the data redundancy requirements
• Whether the archive vendor is providing the appropriate products on a limited budget

Evaluating your archive vendor is essential before you choose them for your health system’s data archival. This is because the health outcomes of the hospitals, including patient safety, get directly impacted if the archival process is not right or secure. When you choose the right vendor for your hospital, the relationship also automatically builds up for the better.

Health Organizations Must Work on Removing Barriers in Organizational Culture and Encouraging Transparency

Health organizations usually tend to rely on organizational procedures and techniques similar to the ones they have been using in the past. Sometimes, that may work for your organization, but most other times, it can greatly hinder collaboration. Hence, it is very important to review the policies and processes of your health organization in order to develop for the better. Opening up more and removing work-culture barriers can help in improving collaboration.

Apart from that, there should also be enough trust and transparency between the health system and IT vendors. The process of providing a safe, secure, and reliable archival strategy can be complex. Hence, it is essential to provide accurate insights and opinions to the vendors. Through this, vendors would have the opportunity of sharing the care and decision-making ideas and thus would enhance a safe and secure health data archival.

A good collaboration is a result of both sides playing equally well. Just as it is important for the archive vendors to adhere to the norms and culture of the health system while following the required healthcare standards, it is also essential for the health organizations to pave the way for the vendors to do so. It is important to remember that collaboration is the key to a stronger work environment and better work results. While it is not always easy, following the above-discussed points will help in taking this two-way process to a better place.