With 2019 now upon us, we thought you might enjoy a compilation of our top 10 most popular blog posts of 2018. We hope you enjoyed the content from 2018, and look forward to being a leading health IT resource in 2019.

10. Inpatient EMR replacement: Epic & Cerner gain, while Allscripts & MEDITECH lose market share
	An upsurge of M&A activity continues in the healthcare delivery organization (HDO) space as stakeholders seek to increase the scale and capabilities needed for value-based care and reimbursement. The HDO M&A trend is likely to continue, if not increase, in 2018 as HDOs adopt additional value-based care models and transition to risk-based arrangements.
9. Top 4 Legacy EMR Support Partner Evaluation Criteria
	Over 50 firms were rated in the KLAS Report: Implementation Services 2017. How then does a healthcare delivery organization (HDO) decide which vendor is the best fit for providing legacy EMR support as they transition to a new EMR? In examining which firms provide the best value for HIT Implementation Support and Staffing, KLAS found that consistently exceeding expectations drives provider success. In a market segment flooded with high-performing firms, those that consistently hit deadlines and deliver quality resources are best at helping providers succeed.
8. Legacy EMR Support Resources
	When a HCO considers outsourcing any portion of their IT operation, there are many unknowns and considerations to assess. An ideal HIT service provider can offer coordinated, broad-ranging integrated services—a one-stop-shop for support. This way your practice only interacts with a single point of contact that addresses the needs and personality of the practice, and offers a tailored package of options. There isn’t a need to go “shopping” for a variety of vendors, and have your staff spend most of their time trying to coordinate differing and even conflicting service providers.
7. EMR Data Archival ROI
	Application retirement is nothing new. Large organizations from all industries have had application retirement strategies in place for a decade or more. Any time an organization outlives a large IT system (or, in many cases, that system’s vendor), retirement becomes a pressing need. These systems are costly to maintain and represent an ever-growing, significant liability the longer they exist. As it stands today, healthcare delivery organizations have enormous sums of money tied up in infrastructure, software licensing, and support costs for one — or many — clinical system that are now deemed “legacy.”
6. How Community and Rural Hospitals are Prepping for Value-Based Care
	The transformation of the nation’s healthcare system really begins with the advances that support the relationship between providers and their patients, which has been extended beyond the bedside and examination room. Information technology has been at the vital center of this transformation, which has accelerated quickly over the last 10 years. However, widespread deployment of information technology has not eliminated the challenge. Health IT leaders at community and critical access hospitals face a range of problems that are often not appreciated.
5. Achieving optimal sepsis sensitivity and specificity with EMR surveillance
	Sepsis accounts for half of hospital deaths, according to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It’s the leading cause of readmissions, and more than $20 billion is spent on it annually. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sepsis has become a medical emergency. Every year there are at least 1.7 million cases of sepsis implicated in as many as 270,000 deaths, the CDC says. Paramount to a successful sepsis detection solution is performance with regard to sensitivity and specificity.
4. Healthcare Information Exchanges: The Glue Holding Together Value-based Healthcare
	Health Information Exchanges have evolved in many ways. Some are government-led, some operate as public utilities with governmental oversight, and some are private sector-led with government collaboration. Whatever their business model, these HIEs allow doctors, nurses, pharmacists, other healthcare providers and patients to access and securely exchange vital medical information electronically. They facilitate care coordination by providing a complete view of the patient, enabling real-time intervention at the point of care, determining risk and providing actionable data. HIEs integrate electronic health records (EHRs) into broad IT interoperability networks.
3. Ancillary Clinical System Retirement & Archiving: Considerations & Best Practices
	EMR replacement drives not only EMR data archiving, but also data retirement of the ancillary clinical systems that interact with the EMR. In most cases, the strategy of replacing a best-of-breed portfolio with an integrated enterprise EMR solution results in modules of the new EMR providing functionality that ancillary clinical systems previously offered. As a result, the retirement of legacy ancillary systems is pursued as part of a broader portfolio rationalization.
2. How to Successfully Manage the Staffing Costs of Migrating to a New EHR
	The nature of data structure and storage within the eClinicalWorks database is non-traditional and complex. In general, these complexities are due to the following two reasons: Most of the data is stored at an encounter level and duplicated at each encounter rather than stored at a patient level and simply referenced at each encounter. The application allows for nearly any type of data to be entered as unstructured data.
1. Legacy Revenue Cycle Management System Retirement: Expediting A/R Liquidation and Cash Acceleration
	A critical component of legacy system retirement is how outstanding Accounts Receivables (A/R) are handled. Hospitals and other healthcare organizations must weigh collection of outstanding A/R reconciliation when replacing legacy systems. Important components of success include: providing a cost-effective alternative to working post-sunset A/R with limited disruption to staff, users, and patients, ensuring cash collections remain at or exceed current performance, allowing revenue cycle leadership to focus on successful implementation and training of the new system, and expediting the legacy system retirement.