Providers Rely on Adaptable Infrastructure To Enhance Patient Care

The architecture “is operationally so much simpler to manage,” says Marc Heynderickx, principal engineer at Legacy Health. And because Everpure provides capabilities such as immutable snapshots, which the health system automatically uploads to Microsoft Azure, the organization won’t lose access to patient data in the event of a disaster.

“Our goal has always been to provide a stable, resilient system for end users with minimal disruptions or downtime,” Heynderickx says. “The way it is now, that’s exactly what we have, and it means we can actually sleep at night.” 

Securing Patient Data for Legacy Health and Franciscan Health

The first organization to run Epic on Everpure with Nutanix as the hypervisor, Legacy Health is among healthcare’s true pioneers when it comes to modernizing storage and data protection. It deployed adaptable infrastructure, Heynderickx says, “to keep up with technology and cybersecurity while providing a rock-solid foundation for patient care.”

Today, Heynderickx and Stoecklin regularly talk to other IT leaders about the benefits of an architecture that treats storage and data management consistently across on-premises and cloud environments. They’ve also watched as some have followed their lead to launch similarly transformative projects of their own.

The fact that reliability and financial concerns are among the primary drivers for storage modernization comes as no surprise to Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester Research. In a recent report, he and his colleagues noted that hardware expenses dominate on-premises storage costs. And resiliency has become a priority for most enterprises, he says, “because data itself has become so valuable.”

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Both security and resilience were top of mind for Jay Bhat when he helped facilitate the migration of Epic to Azure Virtual Machines as CISO at Franciscan Health. With 11 hospitals in Indiana and Illinois, the organization chose to move its EHR from a private cloud to improve scalability as it expands, but rising costs also played a significant role, “and protecting our data was always at the forefront of our decisions,” Bhat says.

The Azure environment allowed Bhat and his team to build in security controls at the beginning of the project rather than trying to retrofit protections into infrastructure designed a decade or more ago. It also offers failover capabilities to data centers in different regions, ensuring they can keep all systems online in case of an outage or emergency.

Today, his team has much better visibility into both Fransciscan Health’s systems and overall data movement, Bhatt says, and the ability to segment and manage workloads is vastly improved compared with the legacy setup. The team now relies on a mix of cloud services and on-premises technologies, carefully placing workloads for individual applications “based on what we need from those systems in terms of our ability to provide patient care,” he says.

Atlantic Health Can Scale Better With Modern Infrastructure

Franciscan Health’s hybrid infrastructure would look familiar to Meraz Nasir, vice president of infrastructure and cybersecurity at Atlantic Health. For its EHR, the N.J.-based organization relies on Epic Hosting, a hybrid product combining Epic’s infrastructure and services with tools and systems that remain under Atlantic Health’s control.

With nearly 6,000 affiliated physicians, eight hospitals and more than 550 sites of care, the nonprofit health system serves millions of patients in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. Optimizing storage is especially important for data-intensive applications such as the organization’s picture archiving and communication system, Nasir says. “We offer a lot of imaging services, and we need a way to store those images efficiently and cost-effectively.”

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With that in mind, Atlantic Health partnered with Everpure, deploying not only FlashArray but also its unified FlashBlade file and object storage array. Delivered as a service, the Everpure architecture relies on on-premises hardware and deep integrations with public cloud providers.

“CT scans, MRIs — every year, we’re providing more and more, and the data files they generate are getting larger and larger,” Nasir says.

Atlantic Health’s storage solution ensures data protection with immutable snapshots and encryption, and more important, allows for regular PACS upgrades without service disruptions. It can be easily scaled to meet the organization’s growing capacity needs, and its cloud connectivity means Nasir’s team has multiple options when deciding where to store individual files.

Images that providers need right away, for example, are kept at the point of care, while older imaging studies might be moved to a cloud data warehouse “because we’re not so worried about latency and know that they won’t be pulled frequently,” Nasir says. “Storing them there won’t hinder patient care, but it is going to save on costs.” 

Similar to Legacy Health and Franciscan Health, Atlantic Health is actively expanding through new facility construction, acquisitions and partnerships. The organization is seeing more patients each year, which means it also requires more technology, including solutions for data storage and protection. The way Nasir sees it, his job moving forward is clear: With patient care as his North Star, he’ll continue working with vendors that provide the modern infrastructure Atlantic Health needs to succeed.