The right strategy can help hospitals preserve historical dataas well as provider trust and patient satisfaction. Nearly three years ago, PwCs Health Research Institute dubbed 2016 the year of merger mania in healthcare. With so many shifts occurring across the industry, many health systems have looked to mergers and acquisitions to help them survive and thrive in a value-based care world.1 The trend continues to this day. In fact, earlier this year, PwC reported the announcement of more than 250 healthcare M&A deals in the second quarter of 2018 alone.2But while scaling up in this manner has multiple advantages for health systems, it is not without challenges. One of the biggest is maintaining data integrity as organizations migrate data into a common electronic health record (EHR) platform.There are many reasons why a given healthcare organization may need to migrate patient data from one EHR system to another to provide a single system for multiple institutions in an M&A situation, to lower the costs involved with maintaining an outdated legacy system or to eliminate dangerous data siloes that interfere with clinical decision-making, just to start. But Rod Piechowski, Senior Director of Health Information Systems at HIMSS, said that healthcare organizations should not downplay the data integrity risks involved with such a move.

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