How long you must keep medical records, why a retired EHR still has to retain them, and how a secure archive satisfies HIPAA and state retention rules — without keeping the legacy system alive. General guidance, not legal advice.
HIPAA requires covered entities to retain required documentation (policies, authorizations, notices, and similar) for at least six years from creation or last effective date.
How long the medical record itself must be kept is set by state law and varies widely — commonly several years for adults, and longer for minors (often years past the age of majority). Medicare/Medicaid and payer rules can extend this further.
The practical takeaway: a retired EHR’s records typically must remain intact and retrievable for many years — which is exactly why you archive rather than delete. Always confirm the specific periods with your compliance and legal teams for the states and payers you operate in.
A read-only archive keeps records intact for the full retention window and reconciles to source to prove nothing was lost.
Role-based read-only access with full logging of who viewed or exported what — the audit trail retention itself requires.
Encrypted at rest and in transit, satisfying the HIPAA Security Rule’s safeguards for archived ePHI.
You meet retention on a low-cost archive instead of paying to keep the whole EHR alive just for read access.
HIPAA governs protected health information and its documentation; SOX governs financial-reporting records for public companies (audit and accounting records, generally seven years). A healthcare organization that is also a public company may be subject to both — one reason a single, well-governed archive that can hold clinical and financial data is valuable.
HIPAA itself requires required documentation (policies, authorizations, etc.) to be kept for at least six years. How long the clinical medical record must be retained is set by state law and payer rules and varies — often several years for adults and longer for minors. Confirm specifics with your legal/compliance team.
You can retire the application, but not the records — they must be retained for the applicable period. Archiving the data to a secure, read-only store lets you decommission the EHR while still meeting retention.
A compliant archive keeps ePHI encrypted, access-controlled and audit-logged, and retains it for the full window. Archival supports HIPAA compliance; your policies, BAAs and access governance complete it.
HIPAA covers health information and its documentation; SOX covers financial-reporting records (generally seven years) for public companies. Some healthcare organizations must satisfy both.
Tell us the system (Cerner, MEDITECH, Epic, Allscripts, athenahealth…) and your retention window — we’ll scope a HIPAA-ready archive and decommissioning plan.