January 10, 2024 | Posted in News
After initial trepidation, healthcare is embracing the cloud. A 2021 survey from the College of Healthcare Information Technology executives found 82% of organizations are using cloud technology in some way. One motivation is to help foster innovation, and another is to better manage growth. Security is also an important consideration: Nearly half of organizations surveyed are moving data recovery and backup to the cloud to protect against ransomware and other cyberattacks.
It’s easy to see why organizations are making this move. A 2021 paper noted roughly 80% of ransomware attacks impact patient care. Disruptions typically last two weeks and are commonly associated with delays in scheduled care, diversions of emergency and acute care, revenue losses and negative impacts on patient outcomes – including increased mortality rates
These trends show there’s a clear benefit to transitioning mission-critical electronic health record disaster recovery to the cloud. When an EHR system comes back up in hours, not weeks, disruption is minimized across the organization. The prevalence of third-party applications and undocumented integrations can make moving EHR DR to the cloud a tedious and error-prone process.
Automated transition eases cloud implementation burden
Baptist Memorial Health Care (BMHC) operates 22 hospitals, along with numerous clinics and specialty locations, across Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The health system’s vision for its future of care delivery included modernizing technology infrastructure to ensure reliability and resilience in the face of cyberattacks while enhancing overall digital capabilities.
To help make this vision a reality, the health system tapped staffing and consulting services company Optimum Healthcare IT. Together, BMHC and Optimum saw the migrating the health system’s existing on-premises, EHR Alternative production environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for disaster recovery. Critically, BMHC sought to do this in a way that considered the large number of integrations, ensuring that all sites of care and the patients they serve would benefit from the same updated architecture.
Optimum was well positioned to assist BMHC with what could have otherwise been a daunting task. That’s because the company employs the use of AWS Healthcare Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) and the Deployment Automation for Epic (DAEA) on AWS solutions to automate the deployment of AWS infrastructure for Epic. This let Optimum expedite the deployment while minimizing user errors often associated with system migration and reconfiguration.
“We’re incredibly excited about the selection of AWS and Optimum Healthcare IT,” said Tom Barnett, BMHC’s Chief Digital and Information Officer. “We look forward to working closely with both AWS and Optimum Healthcare IT to take the next steps toward our digital future.”
Cloud complements digital strategy
The transition to Epic on AWS solutions complements BMHC’s cloud-first digital strategy in five important ways:
Faster recovery means less downtime
According to Barnett, the health system saw performance improvements in the range of 5% to 20% during the first activation of EHR DR.