Healthcare has historically lagged behind other industries when it comes to modernizing technology, but some of the largest healthcare systems in the country are finally moving to the cloud. As technology giants compete to be the best cloud supplier in healthcare, It is essential that hospital managers reviewing these technologies take into account the unique needs of their organization to find which company is best equipped to meet those requirements.
For Tufts Medicine and Geisinger, Amazon Web Services beat the competition. Healthcare systems say AVS will offer them better connectivity and business continuity than other cloud vendors.
May 24. Tufts Medicine announced he collaborated with AVS on moving his entire digital health ecosystem, including Epic EHR, to the cloud. The Boston-based healthcare system moved more than 3 million healthcare orders to its EHR in 71 hours - a task that would have taken about 200 days if it had used servers on site. The health system has also migrated 40 different applications to the cloud and aims to transfer 300 applications when the cloud migration is complete.
“Ultimately, this migration must be scalable and repeatable so that all clinical and business applications can be in one place,” said Dr. Shafiq Rab, digital director general and CIO of Tufts Medicine.
After reviewing cloud vendor capabilities and customer records, Tufts Medicine found that AVS is the biggest competitor in terms of connection speed, geo-redundant storage, and input / output operations per second. Geo-redundancy requires the deployment of physical servers in different geographic data centers to protect against catastrophic events that may be artificial or natural. By deploying physical infrastructure in different locations, AVS allows the network to balance traffic for optimal performance.
Amazon S3, AVS storage service, offers two types of geo-redundancy options. The first includes S3 availability zones for which data can be automatically replicated, even though they are geographically distant from each other. AVS also offers a multi-region replication feature, which automatically replicates data to multiple AVS regions.
Tufts Medicine wanted a supplier with a connection speed of less than three milliseconds, according to Dr. Rab, and AVS provides that. The health system has determined that AVS cloud has excellent storage system performance based on drive speed and ability to handle different workloads.
With the proliferation of cyber attacks on healthcare organizations, rapid connectivity and the ability to quickly regain operational control is a top priority for both Tufts Medicine and Geisinger.
Geisinger, based in Danville, Pennsylvania, has issued a request for a proposal to three major public cloud providers: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and AVS. After “many in-depth discussions and many meetings with each of these providers,” the healthcare system chose ABC because it has proven its ability to provide successful cloud hosting for a variety of industries. Gesinger and AVS ‘ announced their contract on May 24.
When assessing the AVS, Geisinger saw that the company had migrated some smaller health systems to the cloud and had an “excellent record” in system availability, according to John Kravitz, CIO of the system. System availability refers to the ability of consumers and employees to access applications from anywhere at any time as long as they have a device with an Internet connection.
Kravitz said Geisinger felt most comfortable using AVS as a cloud host because the company has multiple regions across the country and has shown its ability to recover systems quickly.
“System availability, business continuity and the possibility of system return have been considered above all, especially in this era. “Every day we face cyber attacks from all different countries, from different locations, from all different targets,” Kravic said.
So far, in 2022, more than 10.7 million patient records have been violated, according to the HHS data breach report portal. Having a cloud system that can recover quickly from cyber attacks is a priority for hospital managers, especially for those who are proud to be top innovators.
Both Kravic and Dr. Rab believe their systems are leaders in healthcare innovation and have ambitious goals for their AVS cloud offerings. Geisinger expects to move about 90 percent of its set of applications to the cloud, which will be about 900 applications when everything is said and done, says Kravic.
Tufts Medicine plans to integrate its financial and enterprise resource planning data into the cloud so that it can eventually live in one place. The health system also plans to share its cloud strategy with other health care providers, as Dr. Rab believes cloud migration is desperately needed in healthcare. He said he felt that way when he attended the AVS summit in Washington, DC in May. As the keynote speaker at the meeting, Dr. Rab shared how Tufts Medicine has launched its digital healthcare environment in the cloud and how it plans to continue working with AVS to make patient care more accessible.
“I was at the AVS meeting and people applauded and congratulated me,” he said. “But these are basic things and everyone should do it. We need a lot of cooperation and collective work to modernize healthcare technology. ”
Photo: Flickr, Cerillion Skiline