In a new piece for HIT Consultant, Clearsense CTO Jonathan Cook argues that healthcare modernization doesn't actually finish at go-live — it finishes when the legacy system it replaced is safely shut down.

While implementation teams rightly focus on launching and stabilizing new platforms, the old systems are often left running in the background, quietly generating the operating expense, security exposure, and data fragmentation that justified replacing them in the first place. Despite mounting financial and cybersecurity pressure to retire these systems, most health systems still lack a real program to do it. A recent CHIME survey data shows 80% of CIOs haven't fully implemented an application rationalization program, even though most see it as critical to cost savings.

Cook's core argument is that decommissioning fails not because of technical difficulty alone, but because of a governance gap — it's treated like an IT side-project instead of an enterprise-level discipline with clear ownership, funding, and repeatable process. He points to real-world examples of legacy systems with no documentation, lost credentials, or proprietary data formats that make extraction far harder than expected, and introduces the idea of an "application undertaker" role (a term coined by Gartner) dedicated to governing safe, controlled application retirement. His conclusion: as this work increasingly requires specialized expertise most internal IT teams don't have bandwidth for, managed decommissioning services are becoming essential to actually closing the loop on modernization investments.

Read the full article on HIT Consultant.