Data Integrity and Operations: Helping HIM Teams Move to Epic Gallery
Davey has spent 21 years working inside legacy document management and Epic environments and leads FastLane delivery at Quoris.
Ask a CIO about their Gallery migration and you’ll hear about timelines, budgets, and go-live dates. Ask Health Information Management (HIM) the same question and you’ll hear something different: what happens to the millions of documents they’re responsible for, and whether anything gets lost, mislabeled, or stuck in limbo along the way.
HIM teams own the contents of the DMS, where day-to-day functions like scanning, indexing, records releases, and document corrections are completely intertwined with the legacy platform (such as OnBase, ChartMaxx, and OpenText).
With patient data in the mix, Gallery migration is never just a technology project. For HIM, it’s a major operational one, and data integrity is on the line.
Migrating to Gallery means HIM will no longer be straddling two systems to manage a complete patient record. Bringing documents into the Epic environment with the rest of the health system’s patient data promises faster review for HIM and retrieval for clinicians. Without documents moving in and out of the EHR, HIM teams are able to maintain high standards of data integrity while slashing administrative workloads.
IT and HIM both play a critical role in data management during a Gallery migration, though their focus areas differ. IT personnel are laser-focused on getting all the data and metadata out of the legacy DMS, while HIM teams work through the mechanics of how everything should look once it’s in Gallery, where it exists at any given moment during the migration, and the defensibility of what happens to it along the way. Meanwhile, both teams continue their normal day-to-day job functions.
HIM as a Gallery migration stakeholder
The piece of a Gallery migration that tends to land with the HIM team is quality assurance. During Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL), HIM engages with the migration partner to both ensure data integrity and provide historical context as data migration experts work to clean-up and optimize Gallery-bound data.
In the legacy DMS, data generally exists as a massive, fragmented catalog of uncompressed images, multi-page PDFs, and decades of accumulated, unstructured clinical documentation. A health system’s post-migration Gallery inventory shouldn’t be a 1:1 copy of what was inside the legacy environment, but a meaningfully improved dataset. Close collaboration between HIM and data migration experts throughout the entire migration ensures this outcome.
The Gallery migration program built with HIM in mind
FastLane is Quoris’ accelerated extraction and conversion pipeline for Gallery-bound data.
In a successful migration program, the partner needs deep expertise in both the legacy DMS and Gallery. That combination is what lets them analyze the legacy environment, guide HIM decisions, flag exceptions, advise on what should and shouldn’t migrate, and execute the migration while running reconciliation in parallel.
Pipeline programs like FastLane earn their value with HIM by partnering with them on critical data management decisions while performing the extraction and conversion with speed and integrity. HIM brings the operational knowledge of the system and supervises data integrity, while migration experts bring the experience and the technical analysis.
The following sections outline key areas of collaboration, with recent FastLane experiences illustrating how they play out in practice.
Data discovery
Helping health systems better understand what lives in their system is a crucial first step in any data migration. HIM has a good understanding of the legacy DMS, but before migrating millions of documents to a new system, they need an in-depth look at every single file. Many of the documents analyzed during discovery won’t have been looked at in years.
During data discovery, Quoris’ FastLane team identified numerous document types with only a handful of associated documents, despite the system having been in use for ten years.
These types of insights help the HIM team decide what’s really worth spending time migrating and what might be obsolete.
Defining the migration scope
Early-stage work should also flag what doesn’t need to be migrated. This includes documents that fall outside the patient record or already live somewhere else.
One FastLane customer had a few documents that we can only assume were scanned in by accident… takeout menus, office flyers. Needless to say, we were able to safely exclude those from the migration.
By identifying exclusions like these early on in the process, millions of unnecessary documents can be removed from the migration scope without compromising data integrity, effectively shortening the project, reducing processing time, and freeing up HIM to focus on the content that matters.
Managing imperfect data
Data quality issues are characteristic of DMS inventories; every legacy system has records with metadata issues, document types that need additional review, or unusually large files that take longer to process. Accelerated migration programs expect to encounter imperfect data, so managing issues of data integrity should not be a stalling factor.
Working with one FastLane customer’s HIM team, we discovered more than one million documents with metadata issues. Rather than pausing the migration until every record was corrected, we worked with the HIM team to resolve those issues before extraction. That kept the main migration moving while a plan was developed for handling the exceptions.
Protecting the larger migration timeline
Unexpected HIM challenges come up in every migration. Without the right guardrails, conversions are especially prone to becoming the bottleneck that delays the entire Gallery go-live.
Most Gallery migrations are on a tight timeline. Customers have contract deadlines, implementation schedules, and go-live dates they’re working toward. The longer a migration stretches, the longer a health system is paying overlap maintenance fees.
During an extraction and conversion project, the client’s coding team was still actively working through recent encounters. Establishing a practical cutoff point gave everyone a clear scope to work from. As those newer records were finalized, we were able to bring them into the migration scope later.
If progress stops every time an edge case surfaces, the project slows to a crawl. A migration partner should work with HIM to identify those issues early, separate them from the main extraction, and continue moving forward while they’re resolved in parallel.
Maintaining day-to-day HIM operations
It’s crucial for HIM teams to be able to maintain business-as-usual operations during a Gallery migration. That means no temporary processes, no lapses in live document corrections, documents are always retrievable, and legal holds are unaffected. Data extraction and conversion should not interrupt HIM operations or ongoing data integrity at all.
Confidence in continuous reconciliation
HIM needs to ensure absolute data integrity without slowing down processes. Complete confidence before cutover requires reconciliation to run concurrently with extraction and conversion, not a post-mortem summary report.
In an advanced migration program like FastLane, live document-type-level reconciliation shows exported records matching imported records throughout the migration.
Final perspective
HIM teams are crucial collaborators in any Gallery migration. Finding a migration partner to work alongside them on critical data management decisions without letting imperfect data inhibit progress makes the difference between an expedited extraction pipeline and one that stalls the entire migration timeline. With the right safeguards in place from day one, HIM teams can oversee data movement with clarity and go live on Gallery with confidence.
Get in the FastLane to Gallery
Quoris’ FastLane program is built to handle hosted and on-premise environments with equal speed and expertise. We accelerate time-to-start by expediting contract turnaround, then offer kick-off within two weeks of execution. Then, we work round-the-clock to extract and convert your data for Gallery.
Our US-based team pulls from decades of DMS and Epic experience to expertly navigate both hosted and on-premise legacy environments, across any DMS
What we support: Our FastLane team handles migration from OnBase, ChartMaxx, Quanum, OpenText, M-Files, Box, and other legacy document management platforms.
If your legacy DMS is hosted and Gallery is on your roadmap, we have done this before.
Frequently asked Questions
The piece of a Gallery migration that lands with the HIM team is quality assurance.
While IT personnel are laser-focused on getting all the data/metadata out of the legacy DMS, HIM teams are working through the mechanics of how everything should look once it’s in Gallery, where it exists at any given moment during the migration, and the defensibility of what happens to it along the way.
Accelerated migration programs expect to encounter imperfect data, so managing issues of data integrity should not be a stalling factor. A migration partner should work with HIM to identify those issues early, separate them from the main extraction, and continue moving forward while they’re resolved in parallel.
Reconciliation runs concurrently with extraction and conversion, so when it’s time to load data into Gallery, there should be no surprises.
A Gallery migration introduces some operational change, particularly around go-live. While documents remain accessible through the legacy system until the transition is complete, HIM teams should expect training, new workflows, and a temporary period of working across both systems. With proper planning, these changes can be managed while keeping day-to-day operations moving.
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