3. Cloud Platforms Free Up Valuable Time — and Money
Hospitals hold massive amounts of sensitive patient data, and it can be a headache for IT staff to keep every system patched and secure. That’s why Novant Health, based in Winston Salem, N.C., migrated its EHR system to a cloud platform in February of 2019. Since the move, the organization has seen ample benefits.
"We have freed up a tremendous amount of engineering resource time from having to manage that infrastructure,” James Kluttz, vice president and CTO of Novant Health, tells Becker’s Health IT & CIO Report. “We have been able to redeploy our resources to focus on business-driven initiatives. We've been able to realign our resources in unique ways that also drive even more cloud adoption.”
That change freed up not only staff but budget as well. With the move, the organization gained insight into what its future cost models would look like. Kluttz mentions that Novant has since “hit a home run,” staying on track with those models.
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4. Cloud Reduces Downtime and Helps to Eliminate Sources of Error
Before merging with AMITA Health last year, Presence Health in Chicago adopted Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to help with their electronic medical records upgrade. The result was a responsive and robust system that gave care providers near immediate access to the information they needed, whenever they needed it.
The hospital’s EMR tracked workflow exceptions — unacceptable delays in accessing patient records — and the cloud helped the organization to immediately halve these.
“There was a dramatic improvement the day we cut over to Nutanix — the number of exceptions plummeted from 0.8 percent to just 0.4 percent,” said Jeremy Bernstein, then interim CTO of Presence Health, in a customer case study. The cloud also facilitated efficient communication among care team members and enabled the provider to implement barcode medication administration, helping to ensure everyone was consistently on the same page.