Essential Questions to Ask When Considering a Hosted EHR System

MTS has moved a lot of EHR servers to the cloud.

What should you be thinking about when considering your own move to the cloud?

Get answers to the most essential questions you have about EHR hosting. Read on to gain perspective around hosted EHRs systems including use cases, time frames that work best to move to the cloud, and pricing / cost considerations.

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It’s time to refresh our hardware. Should we move to the cloud?

Anytime you’re looking to upgrade or replace your servers is a good time to take a look at moving to the cloud. In my experience, once you consider the up front or capital expenditure of new hardware, the installation cost, and the refresh cycle again in another four to five years, the price of moving to the cloud is very comparable. Factor in supply chain issues and the cloud starts to look very attractive. 

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All the issues around security keep me up at night. How can the cloud help?

Believe me, security issues keep everybody up at night. A credible cloud provider will work to make sure that the proper security is in place to protect your data assets. Look for a provider who has a plan on how to protect you. Make sure they include technology including MFA, endpoint detection and response (EDR), and Security Operations Center (SOC) services at a minimum. Also make sure the provider holds security accreditation such as HITRUST, SOC2, or others. Security is now a full-time job; and I believe having a security partner is a winning strategy to prevent breaches and all that goes with them. Don’t go it alone…that’s a recipe for disaster. 

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We have had a lot of staff turnover. How does moving to the cloud affect staffing?

We all know staffing has been an issue and finding and keeping qualified technical staff can be challenging. Moving to the cloud can augment your staff by providing professionals who are dedicated to server operations including backup, disaster recovery and security. Cloud hosting gives IT Managers options when it comes to reallocating IT resources to other priorities within the organization. 

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Should I move my legacy EHR to the cloud? 

As practices consolidate and move to new EHR systems, the question often comes up: can you host my legacy EHR in the cloud? I see the cloud as an ideal solution to this issue. It removes the burden from your support team entirely but makes your system available whenever you need access. As many cloud solutions are consumption based, you can pay only for what you use. This means you can turn VM’s off when not needed and not be charged. We also see servers running Windows Server 2008 that are no longer supported, but when you move these to the Azure cloud, Microsoft includes support of those operating systems at no charge. 

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How does the cloud handle disaster recovery?

The cloud is very fault-tolerant and offers multiple options for disaster recovery. From Zone Redundant storage to full site recovery in an alternate data center with Return to Operation (RTO) in minutes, the options are solid and very affordable. Backups can be in geo-redundant locations for safe keeping and architected to prevent ransomware attacks. 

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The brunt of the COVID-19 crisis is behind us. It appears remote staff are here to stay. How does the cloud accommodate local and remote users?

Business agility is the ability to quickly respond to changes in business conditions or disruptive business events. With the COVID-19 crisis and the migration of workers from office to home, we were very fortunate that we had the cloud at our disposal to accommodate the work-from-home transition. We are now seeing companies move their entire infrastructures to the cloud. This includes not only server workloads, but storage, databases, and desktops. Think about the flexibility and security available to workers accessing their desktop and all the resources they need from any device, anywhere, behind the secure boundaries of a cloud infrastructure. 

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How does the cost compare to hosting on-premises?

Hosting is an operational expenditure billed on monthly basis for the resources you consume or use. Up-front charges can include migration or setup of resources and required licensing although licensing often is included in the monthly recurring charges.  Charges you will see generally consist of compute or virtual machines, storage, bandwidth egress and backup. If you engage with a hosting provider for management, you will see management charges as well. Storage can be allocated based on what you need today and can expand as your needs expand. Same with VM’s as it is very easy to add or decommission VM’s as your needs change.   

One benefit of hosting is the elimination of upgrade cycles – and that will also provide cost savings. No more planning for that next big upgrade expenditure and disruption that comes with upgrades. VM’s are very easy to add cores and memory to – simply select a new VM type and reboot.   

When looking at Total Cost of Ownership, moving workloads to the cloud saves money in several ways: 

• by eliminating costly upgrade cycles (as mentioned)
• lowering IT management costs
• increasing staff productivity
• providing business agility
• gaining the ability to match capacity with demand
• removing resource waste.

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Download our Cloud Hosting Checklist to help initiate a more detailed internal discussion about a move to the cloud. If you have more questions about Cloud hosting, feel free to reach out to our team of experts – we would be happy to have a conversation with you.