What Healthcare CIOs Should Prioritize as They Modernize Their Epic Infrastructure

How Infrastructure Modernization Protects Clinical Continuity

Infrastructure modernization plans should begin with measurable requirements for application availability, latency and recovery, not simply storage capacity, Kopinski says.

“When a clinician opens a chart or is documenting patient care, the system needs to respond consistently,” he says. “If it doesn’t, patient care and staff productivity are likely to be affected.”

The right infrastructure reduces maintenance events that threaten that access. Nondisruptive upgrades, expansions and technology refreshes allow organizations to add capacity or replace components without repeatedly migrating data or scheduling lengthy outages.

Kopinski recommends CIOs establish service-level objectives around Epic and its dependencies, then monitor performance during peak clinical demand.

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Healthcare Organizations Should Place Workloads Deliberately

The choice between public cloud and on-premises infrastructure is rarely cut-and-dried. Cloud platforms can provide rapid provisioning, geographic flexibility and scalable access to analytics and AI services, while on-premises systems can provide predictable performance, low latency, local data control and greater certainty for core production workloads.

“Rather than choosing one environment for everything, health systems can place workloads where they fit best,” Kopinski says.

A deliberate hybrid architecture might keep Epic production services on-premises while using the cloud for development, testing, analytics or disaster recovery. That division can preserve responsiveness for clinical applications while giving IT teams elasticity for workloads with variable or temporary demand.

Placement decisions should reflect clinical criticality, latency, recovery objectives, data sensitivity and demand variability.

Why Building an Isolated Recovery Path Is Necessary in Healthcare

Epic’s isolated recovery environment (IRE) model shows how hybrid infrastructure can be valuable for resilience: A health system can operate Epic production services on-premises while replicating protected data to a segregated cloud or secondary environment.

Immutable snapshots, replication and regular recovery testing provide the foundations for bringing essential EHR functions back safely after a cyber incident.

“That creates a minimal viable EHR that can support patient care when a cyber event happens,” Kopinski says. “It doesn’t necessarily require full migration to the cloud.”

Recovery planning should identify the minimum applications, data and integrations needed to continue care and establish who can authorize restoration, coupled with testing to confirm recovered data is clean and usable, he adds.

Everpure’s Enterprise Data Cloud provides a common data layer and control plane across on-premises, hosted cloud, public cloud and edge environments.

That approach applies consistent policies for provisioning, protection, placement, governance and monitoring, while Everpure Data Intelligence helps make clinical, imaging, financial and protected health data discoverable, classified and contextualized.

Replacing Refresh Shock With Predictability

Legacy refresh cycles can create sharp increases in capital spending, followed by migration costs and repeated capacity planning exercises. Kopinski says CIOs evaluating a modernization program should compare costs across the expected life of the environment rather than emphasizing the initial purchase price.

Everpure’s Evergreen//One provides a cloudlike consumption model intended to align infrastructure spending with required capacity, performance and services, which Kopinski says can give CFOs greater budget clarity and CIOs a more sustainable roadmap while reducing infrastructure changes that could disrupt clinical teams.

An Example for Delivering Availability and Improving Access

New Jersey-based Atlantic Health System needed to replace legacy storage that could not meet Epic’s performance and security requirements while providing uninterrupted access to clinical systems and protecting patient data from cyberattacks.

The health system deployed Everpure FlashArray with an Evergreen//Forever subscription to support Epic, virtual desktops, laboratory systems, medical imaging and other production workloads, while FlashBlade, Commvault and immutable SafeMode snapshots strengthened backup and recovery.

The deployment has delivered 100% availability, enabled nondisruptive upgrades and accelerated access to clinical information, while the latest FlashArray//XL infrastructure supports a virtual desktop initiative serving up to 7,000 concurrent users.

How Healthcare CIOs Can Measure Data Readiness

Modernization results should be assessed through total cost of ownership, uptime, response times and recovery performance. CIOs should also evaluate whether data is accessible, protected and movable across environments.

That transformation also requires participation from clinicians, nurses, administrative staff, infrastructure teams, security leaders and informatics executives.

Kopinski notes that Epic touches too many workflows and adjacent systems for modernization to remain solely an IT project.

“It’s a full team effort,” he says. “Modernization is a transformation because you’re also enabling healthcare practices to modernize how they operate.”

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