What It Actually Takes to Leave a Legacy DMS Behind

For many health systems, moving decades of clinical content into the EHR is only part of the challenge. Completing the transition means extracting and preparing millions of records from an existing DMS environment, migrating them without disrupting patient care, finding the right home for non-clinical content, and ultimately shutting down the legacy system for good.

Powered by CHIME’s Digital Health Insights (DHI) and sponsored by Quoris, this paper explores a three-stage blueprint for moving clinical content into Epic Gallery while preserving the business archive and planning for complete legacy DMS decommissioning. Drawing on a three-part DHI article series and a real-world health system migration, it examines both the technical challenges of migration at scale and the operational decisions required to reach the finish line.

Key Highlights

• Take control of extraction and conversion: Learn why legacy-vendor extraction can become a major migration bottleneck and how early discovery, metadata preparation, validation, and intelligent ingestion can help keep an EHR transition on schedule.
• Move at scale without disrupting care: Explore how health systems can balance migration throughput with the demands of live clinical operations, keeping historical records available while millions of documents move behind the scenes.
• See high-velocity migration in practice: Discover how EvergreenHealth moved 32.5 million records from a hosted DMS solution, completing bulk extraction in 60 days while preparing for its Epic Gallery transition.
• Avoid the read-only trap: Understand why moving clinical records alone does not complete the exit, and how organizations can address AP files, employee records, contracts, and other non-clinical content before retiring the legacy platform.
• Make decommissioning part of the migration plan: Learn why legacy shutdown should be treated as a project deliverable from the beginning so organizations can eliminate redundant costs, infrastructure, workflows, and risk rather than leaving another system behind to maintain.

Download the full paper to learn what it takes to move beyond a legacy DMS and complete the journey from extraction to migration to full decommissioning.