Healthcare has historically lagged other industries when it comes to technology modernization, but some of the largest healthcare systems in the country are finally starting to move to the cloud. As tech giants vie to be the top cloud provider in healthcare, Hospital administrators reviewing these technologies must consider the unique needs of their organization Which company is best positioned to meet these requirements.
For Tufts Medicine and Geisinger, Amazon Web Services beat the competition. The health system says AWS will provide them with better connection speeds and business continuity than other cloud providers.
Tufts Medicine, May 24 Announce It worked with AWS to migrate its entire digital healthcare ecosystem, including Epic EHR, to the cloud. The Boston-based health system moved more than 3 million health accounts into its EHR within 71 hours—a task that would have taken about 200 days using on-premises servers. The health system also migrated 40 different applications to the cloud, with the goal of migrating 300 applications after the cloud migration is complete.
“Ultimately, this migration needs to be scalable and repeatable so that all clinical and business applications can be in one place,” said Dr. Shafiq Rab, chief digital officer and chief information officer at Tufts Medicine.
After reviewing the cloud provider’s capabilities and track record with customers, Tufts Medicine found that AWS was the top contender in terms of connection speed, geo-redundant storage, and input/output operations per second. Geo-redundancy requirements Place physical servers in different geographic data centers to prevent catastrophic events that may be man-made or natural. By placing physical infrastructure in different locations, AWS allows the network to load balance traffic for optimal performance.
AWS’s storage service, Amazon S3, offers two types of geo-redundancy options. The first involves S3 Availability Zones that can replicate data automatically, even if they are geographically far apart. AWS also offers cross-region replication, which automatically replicates data across multiple AWS regions.
According to Dr. Rab, Tufts Medicine wanted a provider with a sub-3ms connection, and AWS provided that.health system determination Based on its drive speed and ability to handle different workloads, AWS’ cloud has excellent storage system performance.
With cyberattacks on healthcare organizations proliferating, the ability to quickly connect and quickly regain operational control is a top priority for Tufts Medicine and Geisinger.
Danville, Pennsylvania-based Geisinger sent out requests for proposals to three major public cloud providers: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AWS. After “many in-depth discussions and multiple meetings with each vendor,” the health system chose AWS because it had proven its ability to provide successful cloud hosting for a variety of industries. Gesinger and AWS’ Announce Their contract on May 24.
In evaluating AWS, Geisinger found that the company had migrated some smaller healthcare systems to the cloud and had a “good track record” for system availability, said John Kravitz, the system’s chief information officer. System availability refers to the ability for consumers and employees to access applications anytime, anywhere, as long as they have a device with an Internet connection.
Kravitz said Geisinger is most comfortable using AWS as its cloud host because the company has multiple regions across the country and has demonstrated its ability to quickly restore systems.
“System availability, business continuity and system recoverability are top priorities, especially in this day and age. We are dealing with cyberattacks every day from different countries, different locations, and different targets,” Kravitz said.
More than 10.7 million patient records have been compromised by 2022, according to HHS’ data breach report Web portals. Having a cloud system that can recover quickly from cyberattacks is a top priority for hospital administrators, especially for those who pride themselves on being top innovators.
Both Kravitz and Dr. Rab see their systems as leaders in healthcare innovation, and they have ambitious goals for the AWS cloud deal. According to Kravitz, Geisinger expects to move about 90 percent of its application stack to the cloud, which will total about 900 applications in total.
Tufts Medicine is planning to integrate its financial data and enterprise resource planning data into the cloud so it can eventually be centralized in one place. The health system also plans to share its cloud strategy with other healthcare providers, as Dr. Rab believes that healthcare urgently needs cloud migration. He said he felt that way when he attended the AWS Summit in Washington, D.C., in May. As a keynote speaker at the conference, Dr. Rab shared how Tufts Medicine is rolling out its digital healthcare environment on the cloud and how it plans to continue working with AWS to make patient care more accessible.
“I went to the AWS conference and people applauded and congratulated me,” he said. “But these are the most basic things that everyone should be doing. We need a lot of collaboration and collective work to modernize healthcare technology.”
Photos: Flickr, Cerillion Skyline
