The Allscripts / Veradigm Cloud Archive — Parquet on Object Storage, HIPAA-Governed

The allscripts / veradigm cloud archive is a Parquet-on-object-storage product that holds Sunrise, TouchWorks, Professional EHR, Practice Fusion, dbMotion, FollowMyHealth and Veradigm Network historical data in immutable, indexed, queryable form on S3 / GCS / Azure Blob — with tiered storage routing per record age and per-state retention policy enforcement. On-prem retention storage typically means keeping the source Sybase or SQL Server database alive on premises, or exporting flat-file dumps to NAS. Both approaches preserve the bytes but make retrieval slow and PHI governance ad-hoc. The allscripts / veradigm cloud archive is queryable in sub-15 seconds per record, governed under your BAA boundary with HIPAA accounting-of-disclosures, immutable via S3 Object Lock, and 70–85% cheaper at scale than the on-prem alternative.

Three reasons. First, Parquet is columnar — analytical queries that scan one column across millions of historical encounters run 10–100× faster than scanning the equivalent Sybase row-store. Second, Parquet is open and self-describing — auditors, attorneys, regulators and successor-system vendors can read it without licensing Sybase, SQL Server or the original Allscripts/Veradigm application stack. Third, Parquet integrates natively with the analytic engines users already have (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Databricks, Spark, Oracle Autonomous Database, DuckDB) — the allscripts / veradigm cloud archive plugs into your data platform without an intermediate ETL layer. The original source-format data is preserved as a checksum-validated backup alongside the Parquet for byte-level reconstruction if ever required.

AWS, Google Cloud and Azure as primaries; OCI for customers consolidating on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure alongside Fusion. Storage tiers per provider: AWS S3 Standard / S3 Infrequent Access / S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval / S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval / S3 Glacier Deep Archive, with S3 Object Lock enforcing immutability. GCS Standard / Nearline / Coldline / Archive, with Bucket Lock for immutability. Azure Blob Hot / Cool / Cold / Archive, with immutable blob storage for tamper-evidence. Tiered routing happens automatically per record age — recent retention (years 0–3) on the hot tier, mid-window (years 3–10) on infrequent-access, long-tail (years 10–30+) on Glacier / Archive. Retrieval from Glacier tiers takes minutes; from hot tiers, milliseconds.

Every cloud provider supported under the allscripts / veradigm cloud archive product has a published HIPAA-compliant configuration with BAA signed at the storage account level. KMS encryption keys live in your account, rotated per your policy. PHI handling applied at archive load (Limited Data Set / Safe Harbor / pseudonymized / aggregate) per data domain as configured by your privacy officer. The per-state retention engine carries each state's medical-records rule per record type — Texas 7yr, Massachusetts 30yr, California 7+ (longer pediatric), Illinois 10yr ambulatory, New York 6yr post-encounter or pediatric age 28, Florida 5yr — and computes the maximum applicable retention per record. S3 Object Lock (or equivalent) enforces the computed window. Records purged past every applicable retention generate a signed certificate of destruction. Auditors see one consolidated retention story per record.

Yes — through role-specific interfaces sharing one underlying archive. Clinicians retrieving historical patient context for continuity of care access through an EHR-style read-only viewer that integrates into Epic / Cerner / Altera Sunrise via FHIR or Care Everywhere — pediatric history, longitudinal medication and problem-list timelines surface in the active EHR. Finance retrieves through OTBI / BI Publisher / Tableau / Power BI views with Limited Data Set scoping. HIM retrieves subpoena, HIPAA right-of-access and OCR-investigation records through the audit retrieval portal with break-glass logging. Internal and external auditors retrieve through the audit portal with engagement-scoped access. Patients exercising right-of-access retrieve through your patient portal with re-identified own-record access. Every retrieval logged centrally for HIPAA accounting-of-disclosures.

Storage cost depends on data volume and tier mix. A typical hospital retiring a 10-TB Sunrise instance with a 25-year retention window — 3 years hot, 7 years infrequent-access, 15 years Glacier — costs $25K–$60K per year in storage. A multi-facility health system retiring 100 TB across multiple Allscripts/Veradigm instances costs $150K–$400K per year in storage. On top of storage, query and operational infrastructure adds $10K–$50K per year depending on query volume. Total typical TCO: $40K–$450K per year depending on scale, vs $300K–$5M+ per year for keeping the equivalent source systems live. The 70–85% TCO reduction reported by health systems migrating to the allscripts / veradigm cloud archive is consistent across scale.

When the active Allscripts / Veradigm system is fully decommissioned (after a successful migration to a successor EHR plus Oracle Fusion downstream), the allscripts / veradigm cloud archive becomes the long-term sole source of historical truth for retention obligations. Fusion's analytic layer (OTBI, BI Publisher) registers the archive Parquet store as an external data source via Oracle Autonomous Database or Parquet connector — a single OTBI dashboard combines current Fusion data with historical Allscripts/Veradigm data without ETL'ing the archive into Fusion. Successor EHRs (Epic, Cerner / Oracle Health, Altera Sunrise) retrieve historical clinical context through the archive's FHIR or Care Everywhere integration. The archive becomes the bridge between the Allscripts/Veradigm past and the Fusion-anchored future.

Legal holds are per-patient, per-encounter or per-litigation overrides that extend retention indefinitely while active. The legal team places a hold via the archive admin interface, scoped to patient identifier, date range or matter ID. Affected records' retention windows extend until the hold is released. Discovery requests against held records run as standard archive queries scoped to the matter, with results delivered in the format requested (PDF package, native record export, structured ESI). Every discovery retrieval is logged centrally for HIPAA accounting-of-disclosures and for the litigation audit trail. When the hold is released, retention recomputes from the original per-state rules and records past expiration become eligible for purge per the standard certificate-of-destruction workflow.