Recently, Rich Robinson, Head of Marketing Operations at Tegria, sat down with Craig Adams, Associate CIO, and VP of IS, Children’s Wisconsin and Jay Crowthers, Tegria’s Director of Strategic Advisory to discuss the opportunities available to organizations that transition their EHR to the cloud. The discussion focused on how to make a strategic pivot towards cloud-based managed services, how organizations can refocus on patient care, and the benefits of creating a hybrid, cloud-based approach that’s built for the future. Robinson also fielded audience questions and posed them to the speakers. Following are selected excerpts, paraphrased as necessary for clarity.

One of the biggest concerns in discussing a cloud implementation: Can my healthcare organization afford the cost of moving to the cloud?

Crowthers: “Yes” is the short answer. The real value comes when the volume of users goes up and down drastically and when storage needs and processing power needs expand and shrink. In these situations, your cloud provider can move any unneeded capacity and cost of those resources to other clients, thereby passing the savings on to you.

Adams: During COVID we hosted a government field hospital at our State Fairgrounds and because we were hosted (cloud), we were able to scale up dynamically to support this initiative. Then, after implementation we were able to scale down immediately. We didn’t have to buy a single piece of equipment.

Does cloud hosting provide any advantages in deploying new functionality or solutions?

Crowthers: Yes. Let’s look at the previous example of the field hospital. The ability to stand up and stand down quickly incurs only a short-term cost. Plus, the ability to tie into other cloud-hosted tools, to take your data securely into the cloud and to have your interface engine in the cloud provides additional flexibility. In short, every organization is going through some sort of growth and/or shrinking daily and they are standing up environments for training new hires, BI evaluations and metrics, acquiring a clinic, and so on. It is in this constant growth and shrinking back down that you see where a public cloud does well.

Are there any advantages of one cloud solution over another… more specifically, public vs. private cloud?

Crowthers: A public cloud alleviates the responsibility for management of the infrastructure, such as when hosted by a full-service cloud provider such as Azure or Google. The advantage is that they also have the capacity to stand up and stand down IT resources so that when demand for a particular application increases, the public cloud can support that demand. We all saw how the healthcare industry had to rapidly react to the COVID pandemic. A private hosting solution, by contrast, resides on an organization’s own infrastructure and is typically firewall-protected and physically secured. The biggest advantage is that it offers more separation of tools and more control over which tools are shared across clients. In the healthcare environment, safety of data is very important; nobody wants a breach.

How do I get started on a cloud strategy?

Adams: In my experience, beginning by determining organizational goals and then matching the IT goals against them has offered the best internal approach. Begin by asking what don’t I get now with the in-house hosted EHR solution, and what advantages or goals may be achieved by making a host move to the cloud. From there, figure out the IT pieces behind the scenes that the IT audience (mostly) cares about and not the clinicians at the frontline.

What are the first steps to take when considering the move to the cloud?

Adams: We began with a hosting evaluation by looking at best practices in terms of aligning system requirements to performance and scalability. We looked at the financial drivers and considered whether  we were internally staring down a high-dollar hardware upgrade soon.  And if we were, did it make sense to move that CapEx to an OpEx spend.  Next, we looked to develop a cloud strategy by performing a high-level system assessment; we looked at whether we were currently leveraging SaaS products, had we moved anything to the cloud already, and would a hybrid approach make sense. Best advice: Consider all options across both public and private offerings.

Healthcare organizations are about providing patient care, not IT. But what if a move to the cloud not only simplifies systems but saves valuable time and money – both of which can be better spent on care? Start an evaluation. Look at your portfolio, consider your upcoming CapEx spend. What are your short- and long-term growth goals? Look at your staffing goals. Are you struggling to fill staff vacancies, or overpaying? Finally, how are you positioning your healthcare organization?

Want to learn more? Tegria offers cloud hosting solutions for many EHR customers. By providing strategic and tactical support, Tegria enables healthcare organizations to get back to doing what they do best – delivering exceptional patient care.