An increasing number of healthcare organizations are migrating to the cloud to build out their disaster recovery plans, according to Bill Flatley, healthcare lead at OST, an IT and digital consulting firm based in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Minneapolis.
IT budgets are constrained more than ever, he notes, while Epic infrastructure requirements continue to grow by 20% to 40% each year, and often outgrow planned infrastructure lifecycles. Leveraging cloud services for Epic infrastructure offers cost-savings, faster deployments, and simplified infrastructure management, according to OST.
With the rising costs of healthcare seen during the pandemic, healthcare organizations are looking for areas to create efficiencies without impacting patient care and experience.
“It’s become unsustainable to keep up as a hospital or clinic group,” Flatley says. “Over time, the amount of storage a hospital needs grows. They need more servers, more horsepower to stay at a high-performing level, which means a constant increase in cost in traditional data centers. A cloud solution offers a solution to these challenges.”
Migrating to the cloud also eliminates the financial and administrative burden of infrastructure lifecycle refreshes, according to OST.
“One of the primary benefits of moving Epic to the cloud is cost savings,” Nienhuis says. “The second is increased efficiency. When an institution can remove activities they’ve been burdened with in the past, from maintenance to budgeting to trying to forecast what their infrastructure architecture needs will be, they can focus on improving patient care.”
OST will host a webinar on this topic on November 2 at 1 p.m. ET. Aaron Nienhuis, OST’s principal architect of infrastructure solutions, and CIO Jim VanderMey will cover use cases for implementing and migrating Epic environments in the cloud, reducing infrastructure costs with an on-demand cloud infrastructure, and architecting new Epic infrastructure in days rather than months.
To register for the webinar, click here.
