Healthcare organizations hold a powerful legacy — stories of care, leadership and community impact.
HistoryIT preserves and activates your stories through strategic digital preservation, ensuring your history continues to advance your mission today and secure your legacy for generations to come.
“We have been serving the Fort Worth community for over 90 years and we wanted to maintain our organization’s ‘memory’ even with our designed annual turnover. By taking the time to explore our organization’s history and share our story, we are both investing in the retention of our internal knowledge and externally increasing awareness of our impact on the Fort Worth community.”
Elizabeth Knuckley
Past President, Junior League of Fort Worth
The Challenge: Inaccessible Archives
Healthcare institutions face unique challenges with their historical archives:
- Critical founding documents and historical equipment catalogs are stored in physical archives.
- Access to historical materials often requires requests to understaffed medical archives departments.
- Fragile medical documents and artifacts are at risk of deterioration with each handling.
- Medical knowledge continuity and institutional memory are compromised when archives are inaccessible.
The Solution: Strategic Digital Preservation
A comprehensive digital preservation strategy provides:
- Professional digitization of historical medical records, equipment catalogs, and founding documents.
- Application of medical-specific metadata tags to enable precise searching by clinicians and researchers as well as the community.
- Significant cost and time savings compared to in-house digitization efforts.
- HistoryIT clients see an average savings of $5 million and 37 years.
Digital Preservation Services
- We provide surveys and questionnaires to your organization’s contact person to collect information about your historic materials.
- Online or in person, we assess the condition and content of your archival holdings as well as your technology support needs.
- A HistoryIT expert leads stakeholder meetings and interviews in order to effectively collect data for your customized digital archiving strategy.
- Based on results gathered during assessments, HistoryIT develops a customized strategy to organize and digitally preserve your archival holdings.
- HistoryIT experts work with you to pack and ship all materials.
- We handle the digital preservation imaging, tagging, rehousing, and management of the selected archival materials to include in your digital museum.
- You receive a license to Odyssey®, HistoryIT’s digital preservation platform, allowing you to store, tag, and manage items in your digital archive and share them in your digital museum.
- Your Odyssey® license includes an online timeline, biography portal, milestone celebration retrospective, and storytelling platform that give you the freedom to build and share exhibits that are fully accessible to the public.
Impact on Healthcare Fundraising
Digital archives can transform healthcare fundraising through:
- Personalized donor cultivation using medical milestones relevant to prospective donors.
- Sharing links to historical treatments, medical innovations or building campaigns with grateful patients and donors.
- Creating targeted giving opportunities based on donors’ specific medical interests or connections.
- Strengthening stewardship by sharing meaningful historical content, such as photos of donors’ involvement in past hospital events.
Enhanced Healthcare Communications
Medical institutions can leverage their archives across multiple channels:
- Hospital magazines feature historical treatments alongside modern innovations.
- Blog content highlighting pioneering physicians and medical breakthroughs.
- Social media campaigns showcase the evolution of medical equipment and facility expansions.
- Podcast interviews with long-serving clinicians, enriched with archival context.
Clinical and Operational Applications
Digital archives can enhance healthcare operations through:
- Medical staff orientation incorporating institutional history and values.
- Continuing medical education using historical case studies (properly anonymized).
- Interactive kiosks in hospital lobbies enable patients to explore the institution’s history and legacy.
- QR codes linking historical information about hospital wings or departments.
Long-Term Strategic Benefits
Healthcare institutions will realize lasting value through:
- Preservation of institutional knowledge through leadership transitions.
- Reinforcement of medical mission and values through historical context.
- Enhanced community engagement through shared medical heritage.
- Support for medical research through accessible longitudinal records.
Our Process
We transform archival materials, from whatever state they are in, into a 21st-century digital museum.
We help you envision, create and sustain digital collections that deepen engagement and deliver long-lasting value to your organization.
