FAQ

How did this legacy data problem start?

Beginning in the 1990s and early 2000s, hospitals across the country adopted electronic health record (EHR) systems and other specialized healthcare applications to digitize patient information.

Over time, many of those systems were replaced by newer technology. But because hospitals are legally required to retain patient records for years — and because healthcare data migration is extremely difficult and expensive — many organizations continued maintaining access to older systems long after they were operationally retired.

Today, hospitals often pay millions of dollars for ongoing licensing, hosting, storage, and access costs simply to preserve legally required access to historical patient data stored inside outdated platforms.

Why can’t hospitals just save the data somewhere else?

Healthcare data migration is far more complicated than exporting files to a hard drive.

Patient records are often spread across hundreds of interconnected applications, databases, images, documents, and proprietary formats accumulated over decades. Fully converting and validating all historical data during an EHR transition can be operationally risky, technically difficult, and enormously expensive.

As a result, many healthcare organizations migrate only the most clinically essential data into newer systems while preserving older applications separately for legal retention, audits, compliance, and occasional patient care lookups.

In many cases, the overwhelming majority of retained historical data may never be accessed again — yet hospitals still incur substantial long-term costs to maintain compliant access.

How does this impact patients and the future of healthcare?

Modern healthcare increasingly depends on clean, portable, and accessible data.

Artificial intelligence, precision medicine, advanced diagnostics, longitudinal care coordination, public health analysis, and future interoperability efforts all rely on healthcare systems being able to securely access and manage information across time and platforms.

When historical healthcare data remains fragmented across disconnected legacy systems, costs increase, operational complexity grows, innovation slows, and providers often work with incomplete information.

Improving healthcare data portability is not just a technical issue. It is foundational infrastructure for the future of healthcare itself.