Moving From a Third-Party DMS to Epic Gallery: 7 Questions Every Health System Should Answer Before Migration

Contributor Spotlight
Gilbert Gagne, Senior Business Development Manager at Medix Technology, shared his experience supporting healthcare organizations navigating document management system migrations and Epic initiatives to help shape the insights below.

Moving from a third-party document management system (DMS) to Epic Gallery may sound straightforward: move the documents, validate the data, and flip the switch.

In reality, there’s a lot more happening behind the scenes.

Health systems have historically used a variety of third-party DMS platforms alongside Epic, including Hyland OnBase, Hyland Perceptive Content, Hyland OneContent, Quest Diagnostics Quanum Enterprise Content Solutions, and OpenText Documentum. These platforms can become deeply embedded in both clinical and business workflows over years—or even decades.

As Epic health systems evaluate moving documents from a third-party DMS into Gallery, organizations are finding that success depends on decisions around data access, contracts, content strategy, governance, validation, decommissioning, and internal resources long before implementation begins.

In many cases, some of the biggest costs and project risks aren’t tied to the migration itself. They’re determined by decisions made before the project gets underway.

So, before building your Gallery migration plan, here are seven questions every organization should be able to answer.

1. How Will You Access and Extract Your Existing Documents?

Before you can move your documents, you need to understand how you’re going to get them out of the existing system.

If your third-party DMS is managed on-premises, your organization may have relatively direct access to the documents and associated metadata. If the platform is vendor-hosted or cloud-based, extracting that information may require coordination with the vendor.

That can introduce additional costs, lead times, technical requirements, and project dependencies.

Before establishing a migration timeline, understand:

• Where your documents and metadata reside
• Who controls access to them
• What extraction capabilities are available
• Whether the DMS vendor must participate
• Whether extraction or professional services fees apply

Understanding the extraction process early helps establish more realistic budgets and timelines—and can prevent an unwelcome surprise once migration work is already underway.

2. When Does Your Current Third-Party DMS Contract Renew?

Gallery implementations often take about six months, and many organizations choose to run their existing DMS and Gallery in parallel for several months following Gallery go-live to validate converted data and maintain operational continuity.

That makes your current DMS contract an important part of the migration strategy.

Planning the migration around contract renewal can help avoid unnecessary licensing and support costs while reducing the pressure to complete the project against an artificial deadline.

The earlier you understand that window, the more flexibility you have to build a timeline around operational readiness rather than the calendar.

3. What Content Are You Actually Storing in Your Third-Party DMS?

A DMS integrated with Epic may contain clinical documentation, but that doesn’t mean clinical documentation is all it contains.

Depending on the platform and how it has been deployed, the DMS may also support:

• Accounts payable and invoices
• Accounts receivable
• Human resources and employee records
• Contracts and legal documents
• Supply chain documentation
• Administrative records
• Other enterprise content

Not everything stored in your current DMS will necessarily have a destination in Epic.

If departments outside the clinical environment rely on the platform, those documents need their own long-term strategy before the existing DMS can be fully retired.

What moves into Gallery? What moves to another enterprise platform? What needs to remain accessible in an archive? What can eventually be retired?

Answering those questions early is critical to creating a migration strategy that works across the enterprise—not just within Epic.

Otherwise, an organization could successfully move its clinical content into Gallery only to discover that finance, HR, legal, supply chain, or another department still depends on the legacy platform.

4. Do You Really Need to Convert Everything?

When it comes to historical data, more isn’t always merrier.

One of the biggest opportunities to reduce migration costs and complexity is determining what actually needs to move.

Consider questions such as:

• How long has the current DMS been in place?
• How much historical content does it contain?
• Do your document retention policies allow older content to be archived instead of converted?
• If you previously migrated from another DMS, is that legacy content now sitting inside your current platform?
• Do you still have access to the original legacy archive?
• Can portions of historical content be retired while still meeting regulatory, legal, and operational requirements?

A thoughtful retention strategy can significantly reduce conversion effort, complexity, and project costs.

The goal shouldn’t automatically be to move everything. It should be to understand what needs to move, what needs to remain accessible, and what the organization no longer needs to carry forward.

5. Have You Planned for Metadata Mapping and Validation?

Moving documents is only one part of the migration.

Organizations also need to define how document types, indexing, metadata, and classifications in the existing DMS will map into Gallery.

This can become particularly important when a DMS has been in place for many years. Document taxonomies, indexing standards, and workflows may have changed over time, meaning historical content may not be as standardized as expected.

Equally important is establishing a validation strategy to confirm that documents were converted accurately and remain accessible where they’re needed.

Questions to consider include:

• Who owns validation?
• What sampling methodology will be used?
• Which operational teams will sign off?
• How will exceptions be identified and resolved?
• How will the Legal Health Record be validated after conversion?

These activities can be among the most time-consuming parts of a migration, yet they’re easy to underestimate during early planning.

Defining ownership and methodology upfront can prevent validation from becoming a bottleneck later.

6. What Is Your Third-Party DMS Decommissioning Strategy?

A successful Gallery migration doesn’t end at go-live.

The organization also needs a clear path for retiring the existing DMS when the time is right.

If clinical documents have moved into Gallery but finance, HR, legal, supply chain, or another department still depends on the existing platform, the organization may not actually be able to shut it down.

A phased decommissioning strategy should account for:

• Remaining clinical and nonclinical content
• Licensing and support contracts
• Infrastructure and hosting
• Compliance and retention requirements
• Long-term archive access
• Existing integrations
• Departmental workflows
• Operational dependencies

Establishing that roadmap early can help maximize the financial benefits of the migration while minimizing unnecessary overlap between platforms.

After all, it’s difficult to realize the savings associated with retiring a legacy system if you’re still paying to maintain it years after the Gallery implementation.

7. Who Will Keep Your Current DMS Running During the Migration?

A Gallery implementation can demand significant time from DMS administrators, application analysts, Epic analysts, and project teams.

While those resources focus on planning, extraction coordination, metadata mapping, testing, validation, and conversion, the existing DMS still has to keep running.

Day-to-day administration doesn’t disappear because a migration is on the calendar. Neither do user support, issue resolution, system maintenance, interface support, document ingestion, workflow support, or production incidents.

That creates an important resource question:

Who keeps the current environment stable while your internal experts build what comes next?

MedixFlex® can provide experienced professionals to support day-to-day DMS operations while internal teams focus their time and expertise on the Gallery implementation.

This added capacity can help organizations maintain operational stability without placing even more pressure on already-busy internal resources.

Build Your Gallery Migration Plan Before the Clock Starts Ticking

A successful third-party DMS-to-Gallery migration starts well before the first document moves.

Data access, contract timelines, content strategy, retention, metadata mapping, validation, decommissioning, and resource capacity can all shape the cost and complexity of the project.

And perhaps most importantly, organizations need to understand what their existing DMS actually does across the enterprise before deciding how to retire it.

Moving clinical documents into Gallery may solve one part of the equation. Organizations still need a plan for the content, workflows, integrations, and departments that won’t be moving with them.

Addressing those decisions early gives healthcare organizations more control over the migration—and fewer surprises along the way.

Medix Technology helps healthcare organizations add the specialized expertise and capacity needed throughout complex technology initiatives, from planning and implementation support to validation, run-and-maintain services, and post-go-live optimization.

Evaluating a move from your current third-party document management system to Epic Gallery? Connect with Medix Technology to talk through your migration plans, resource needs, and next steps.

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