Rationalization to Archiving: Make the Right Data Move Now

Healthcare CIOs manage a complex ecosystem of clinical, administrative, and operational applications. Hospitals, clinics, and health systems often accumulate a wide array of software over time, ranging from electronic health records (EHRs) and lab systems to billing platforms and legacy imaging tools. Application rationalization, the process of evaluating and streamlining these applications, is not only a cost-saving measure but also a strategic imperative for improving patient care, ensuring regulatory compliance, and enabling effective data archiving.

What makes Application Rationalization imperative for Healthcare? 

Healthcare organizations undertake application rationalization to: 

• Identify redundant or outdated systems, such as legacy EHRs or departmental tools no longer in active use. 
• Evaluate clinical and operational value, ensuring that applications support patient care, safety, and workflow efficiency. 
• Align IT assets with organizational policy and regulatory requirements. 
• Reduce technical debt, freeing up resources for innovation and digital transformation.  
• Make informed vendor decisions which can lead to contract consolidation and cost savings. 

This process involves cataloging applications, assessing usage patterns, determining total cost of ownership, and classifying systems for retention, replacement, or retirement.  

Transitioning from Rationalization to Proper Archiving 

Once applications are marked for decommissioning, healthcare organizations must address these critical questions: What happens to the data? Where will it go? What do we do with it?  This is where archiving becomes essential—not just for storage but having data from legacy systems readily retrievable for helping support continuity of care, legal defensibility, and audit readiness. 

The insights from rationalization directly inform a strategic archiving approach: 

• Clinical Data Preservation: Rationalization processes identify applications and assign them to a category. Examples are Clinical/EHR systems, HR and Payroll, Patient Accounting, Supply Chain Management and Enterprise Financials. This enables targeted archiving of patient records in formats that stay accessible to clinicians and administrators while ensuring retention requirements are met. 
• Regulatory Compliance: Healthcare data is subject to strict retention laws—often requiring records to be kept for 7 to 25 years, dependent on state requirements. Rationalization helps define these timelines and ensures that archiving solutions support compliance with HIPAA, GDPR (if applicable), and other mandates. 
• Interoperability and Access: Retired systems may still hold data needed for patient care or legal inquiries. Rationalization reveals how data is accessed and used, guiding the level of functionality needed in an archive platform. 
• Cost and Risk Reduction: By archiving data from decommissioned applications, healthcare organizations can cut licensing and support fees, reduce infrastructure costs, and minimize cybersecurity risks associated with keeping outdated systems. 
• Litigation and Audit Readiness: Archived data must be defensible in court and accessible during audits. Rationalization helps identify high-risk data sets and ensures they are archived with proper metadata, audit trails, and access controls. 

Data Access Strategies Based on Reference Frequency 

When healthcare organizations are considering options for long-term data archiving solutions, it’s important to define which application data is accessed regularly vs. data that is accessed very rarely. This allows for greater flexibility in how data is stored, which can ultimately lead to added cost savings. Considering an organization’s size, record volume and access requirements makes it easier to figure out the most suitable archiving method.  

While there are many ways to archive your data, making an informed decision is key. Take a moment to review the pros and cons of the many options when determining the best fit for your organization: 

Supporting Archived Systems: IT Team Considerations 

Many EHR software vendors will recommend implementation of their product specific EHR-integrated archive. While this may seem a quick and straightforward way, the limitations and costs alone don’t always make this a practical choice. Also, your IT team may be able to use an internally created solution. While internal solutions may answer the immediate need, it’s important to understand limitations and future state. Will this be a system that is scalable to ingest more data as other applications are decommissioned? Does your staff have the bandwidth and knowledge sharing to ensure maintenance and new data ingestion is consistently on the table? 

The most popular options out there are popular for good reason. A common approach is to use a third-party archiving solution, which is appealing because the vendor can handle hosting, maintenance, patches, system updates. Another possibility is a self-hosted or a fully owned archiving solution. While this may have infrastructure requirements, many companies do offer hosted environments.  

Boost Resilience by Prioritizing Application Rationalization Now 

The most popular options out there are popular for good reason. A common approach is to use a third-party archiving solution, which is appealing because the vendor can handle hosting, maintenance, patches, system updates. Another possibility is a self-hosted or a  offer hosted environments. For example: CereCore's cloud-based Legacy Data Archive solution is based on standard Microsoft technologies and solves for static data retention requirements from retired systems. While active archiving platforms can source from multiple platforms and serve as the foundation for advanced data lakehouse use cases.  

Next Steps   

Interested in learning how CereCore can help you move forward with Application Rationalization? Let’s talk.  

Explore more resources: 

• The Multi-Million Dollar Transformation Opportunity Healthcare Loves to Hate: Application Rationalization 
• Strategic IT Advisory Services Aligned with your Mission