A small outpatient practice moving to Epic Community Connect needed seven years of Allscripts TouchWorks patient history to stay searchable after the old EHR was switched off. Syntra ETL delivered a secure, read-only archive covering roughly 1,200 patient records — built and live in five weeks against a seven-to-eight-week plan, with a sixth week for user training and handover. DataLens provides the historical reporting view, and the archive runs under an ongoing annual hosting and support agreement.
The practice was moving its live care onto Epic Community Connect — but it could not simply switch Allscripts TouchWorks off, because seven years of patient history had to remain retrievable to meet Michigan retention requirements and to answer medical-record requests.
For a practice of this size, the usual options were both bad. Keeping TouchWorks licensed and hosted purely so someone can occasionally open an old chart means paying indefinitely for a system nobody uses for care. Converting all the legacy clinical detail into Epic means a full discrete-data conversion — cost and complexity far beyond what occasional chart review justifies.
What the practice actually needed was narrow and well defined: a searchable, read-only home for roughly 1,200 patients and up to seven years of demographics, encounters, diagnoses, medications, allergies, notes, results and scanned documents — secure, HIPAA-aligned, and simple enough for a clinic with no IT department to use on its own.
A small project, but not a simple one — an EHR off-ramp has to be exact about clinical content, access and compliance.
TouchWorks data had to come out through an approved export, API or database extract agreed with the practice and its vendor — so the extraction design had to work with whatever mechanism was actually available, not an assumed one.
A chart is not just structured fields. Clinical notes, reports, scanned paperwork and attachments had to be carried across and reattached to the right patient and encounter, or the archive would be useless for a records request.
The archive holds protected health information, so US-region hosting, encryption in transit and at rest, named users, role-based access, audit logging and a Business Associate Agreement were requirements — not options — even at this scale.
Clinical and front-office staff — not administrators — would be the day-to-day users. Search, chart layout and reporting had to be obvious enough to learn in a single training week and use months apart without a refresher.
Before anyone would agree to retire the source, patient counts and major record categories had to reconcile between TouchWorks and the archive, with a sample of real charts reviewed side by side by the practice.
Epic remains the operational EHR for current care. The archive had to be a strictly separate, read-only historical repository — nothing written back to TouchWorks or Epic, and no dependency on either for day-to-day care.
A deliberately simple architecture: TouchWorks → Syntra extraction → secure read-only legacy archive.
Confirmed the TouchWorks hosting model, the available extraction mechanism, patient identifiers, required search fields and document handling — then agreed the final archive content against what could actually be extracted.
Seven years of demographics and clinical records, plus notes, reports, PDFs and attachments, extracted through the approved TouchWorks mechanism — preserving source identifiers so every record stays traceable back to the origin system.
A single US-region cloud archive for ~1,200 patients, with content organized into logical chart sections and search by patient name, medical record number, date of birth and other available identifiers.
DataLens provides the historical reporting view over the archive — the layer staff use to look across the retained history rather than one chart at a time, and to pull what a medical-record request actually needs.
DataVault carried the lineage and reconciliation evidence — patient counts and major record categories matched between source extract and archive, with the trail retained so the practice can show its history is complete.
Named users and role-based access, read-only for normal users, activity and audit logging on archive access, and controlled record download or export for authorized medical-record requests.
Planned at seven to eight weeks. Built and live in five, with a sixth week for training.
Confirmed source access and the approved extraction method, agreed the seven-year data scope, and locked down search, security and retention requirements with the practice.
Initial full extraction across seven years of history, source profiling, and assessment of documents and attachments — with source identifiers preserved for later reconciliation.
Loaded and organized the extracted data into chart sections, configured patient search, access control and audit logging, and stood up the DataLens historical reporting view.
Reconciled patient counts and major record categories between source and archive, walked a representative sample of charts through with the practice, and cleared the in-scope exceptions.
Final agreed extract and refresh, production archive load, closing reconciliation and customer sign-off — the archive went live at the end of week five, two to three weeks ahead of plan.
A dedicated week training clinical and front-office staff on patient search, read-only chart review, the DataLens reporting view and authorized export — then formal handover into ongoing support.
A successful project for a small clinic — on a fixed scope, ahead of schedule.
Seven years of TouchWorks history for ~1,200 patients in a single read-only archive, searchable by name, MRN or date of birth and organized into familiar chart sections.
Built and live in five weeks against a seven-to-eight-week estimate, with the sixth week spent on user training rather than catching up.
With history preserved and reconciled, the practice could complete its move to Epic Community Connect without paying to keep the legacy EHR alive purely for read access.
Staff get a reporting view across the retained history — not just one chart at a time — for record requests, continuity questions and audit.
US-region hosting, encryption in transit and at rest, named users with role-based access, audit logging of archive activity, and managed backup and recovery.
The archive runs on an ongoing annual hosting and support agreement — business-hours support for access and application issues, plus the maintenance and platform updates needed to keep it available.
The same platform used on multi-terabyte programmes, applied at clinic scale.
The extraction, transformation and loading engine. DataMove pulled seven years of TouchWorks demographics, clinical records, notes and attachments through the approved export mechanism and loaded them into the archive.
Lineage, reconciliation and governance. DataVault held the evidence that patient counts and record categories matched between TouchWorks and the archive before the practice signed off on go-live.
The analytics and reporting layer. DataLens delivers the historical reporting view over the archived record set that staff use for medical-record requests, audit questions and continuity of care.
The archive was built and live in five weeks, against a planned estimate of seven to eight weeks. A sixth week was used for user training and handover, so the practice was fully self-sufficient roughly two to three weeks earlier than scheduled.
No. Epic Community Connect remains the operational EHR for current care, and the archive is a separate historical repository for TouchWorks records. This was deliberately a preservation-and-retrieval project, not a discrete clinical-data conversion into Epic — which is what kept the cost and timeline proportionate for a practice of this size.
Authorized users can search by patient name, medical record number, date of birth or other available identifiers; open a read-only historical chart covering demographics, encounters, diagnoses, medications, allergies, notes, results and documents; run historical reporting through DataLens; and download or export records for authorized medical-record requests where enabled. Every access is captured in the audit trail.
Three. DataMove handled extraction, transformation and loading out of TouchWorks. DataVault carried lineage and the reconciliation evidence used to prove the archive was complete before sign-off. DataLens provides the ongoing historical reporting view over the archived records.
Syntra hosts and supports the archive under an ongoing annual hosting and support agreement — secure US-region cloud hosting, encryption in transit and at rest, standard backup and recovery, business-hours support for access and application issues, and the maintenance and platform updates needed to keep the archive operational.
Yes. The same pattern — approved extraction, a read-only archive, reconciliation evidence and a reporting view — applies to Cerner, MEDITECH, Epic and other legacy clinical systems being retired. See our Legacy EHR Data Archival solution for the general approach.
Whether you're a single practice or a multi-site system, we can preserve years of legacy clinical records in a secure, searchable, read-only archive — and take the old platform off your bill. Tell us your source system and retention requirement.
Similar Projects
Selected by shared source platform, target platform, industry and project type.