For Unique IT Needs, Look to the Cloud as the Foundation to Grow and Improve Care Delivery

By Chris Gooch, Director of Engineering, Med Tech Solutions

Every healthcare organization’s IT needs are unique. Hardware and devices, licensed software, configured workflows, dedicated staff, budget, locations, and of course, their electronic health record and/or practice management system… All of these guide the ideal IT systems and processes to help each organization thrive and improve care delivery for its unique patient population.

But just as every custom home is unique—even though each is built with the same essential elements as used to construct other very different homes—there are standard IT building blocks that form a strong foundation across a wide range of highly differentiated healthcare organizations. The cloud is one of these.

According to a HIMSS Technology Outlook Survey: The Outlook for Cloud, an increasing amount of the health IT workload is being deployed in the cloud. Today, that’s estimated at 39% of the workload, with a projected 50/50 split of cloud versus on-premises deployment expected in just 12 months. That’s almost a 30% increase from 2018. In addition, COVID is also accelerating planned innovation projects by 43% of healthcare organizations surveyed by Deloitte.

Panel discussion highlights similar cloud successes for very different healthcare organizations

In a recent panel discussion moderated by the healthcare practice editorial team at SmartBrief, two Med Tech Solutions (MTS) customers discussed their move to the cloud to help them reduce costs and complexity, improve care delivery, and support long-term growth. These two customers represent very different organization types with different IT needs and budgets. Arroyo Vista Family Health Center is a network of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) in Southern California, while Optum is a Care Delivery Organization (CDO) with hundreds of providers across the US. Despite those differences, both shared surprisingly similar motivations and results.

Optum uses MTS cloud hosting for its EHR to support about 250 providers across 116 independent practice associations (IPAs). The cloud provides a fast, always-on, and reliable platform for its providers, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Providers have access to the EHR and can review medical documentation for patients and render necessary care, even with telehealth or virtual visits, to support a better patient experience.

Arroyo Vista depends heavily on federal grants to support IT initiatives. They realized that a piecemeal IT approach wasn’t sustainable. The organization’s cloud-based IT strategy centers around three areas: simplify IT to reduce demands on limited resources, drive cost efficiencies, and create an IT approach focused on the organization’s delivery model.

Here are a few excerpts from the discussion between a former senior manager of CIS at Optum, and Miguel Rodriguez, IT director at the Arroyo Vista Family Health Center. The full presentation is available to watch online.

How does the cloud help improve operational efficiency and patient care?

A former senior manager of CIS at Optum said that the MTS cloud allowed his organizations to “focus on delivering the best patient care and not worry about our IT infrastructure.” The cloud provided the availability and performance needed, and a real-time reporting dashboard allowed him to anticipate trends and address them proactively. The cloud also gave him the ability to easily scale and add providers as the organization grew.

In terms of application workflows and compliance standards, he added, “MTS being a HITRUST-certified partner makes it very easy. And it gives me the confidence knowing that, from a server level where we’re offering the products, we have the best security in place to be able to give the providers and the patients peace of mind, knowing that their data is protected in that hosted environment.”

Rodriguez echoed many of the same points. One of his biggest concerns was security compliance and access. This concern has been taken off his plate with the MTS HITRUST-certified cloud, which also gives him access to expertise that his organization typically couldn’t afford. He states that “knowing that we were landing with a partner that was able to support our EHR infrastructure, our workflows, our application support, that was very important.”

Why are healthcare organizations looking to the cloud to address costs?

Both panelists emphasized the value of moving from a capital expense model for server infrastructure to the operational expense model of the cloud. While the cost analysis made sense on its own, Rodriguez adds that, “The security, the peace of mind, that was something that you cannot account for—just the value of that.”

The MTS cloud, with its solid-state hard drives, provided the higher performance Optum’s providers needed while saving Optum about a quarter of a million dollars compared to its previous cloud provider.

The former senior manager of CIS at Optum agreed, stating that now that he’d moved operations to the cloud, “I can focus my staffing more on providing support for the solutions we’re offering. I no longer need a network team, a security team, a server team, and an identity-access management team. [MTS] took that all over for me.”

The MTS cloud, with its solid-state hard drives, provided the higher performance Optum’s providers needed while saving Optum about a quarter of a million dollars compared to its previous cloud provider. “That budget that I was able to free up allowed me to add more staff to my organization to support the applications that we’re serving to our providers,” he said.

Why are healthcare organizations of all types moving to the cloud?

One of the most attractive aspects of the cloud is its customizability. That means we can meet the unique needs of almost any healthcare organization with a wide range of IT goals:

• Support organizational innovation
• Address disaster recovery and improve resiliency
• Improve privacy/security stance and meet regulatory requirements
• Flex IT based on locations, devices, and users
• Reduce costs, including hardware, software, and labor
• Promote team-based, outcomes-driven care delivery model

For more details, watch the complete archived panel discussion, or contact us to discuss your specific needs