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In a small Georgia town, the cloud is helping doctors reimagine healthcare

CloudWave migrated critical healthcare applications to the cloud for stronger disaster recovery and integrated access.

By partnering with CloudWave and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), Upson Regional Medical Center (URMC) moved its imaging and EHR access to the cloud. The case study detailing this migration won the 2018 HPE Service Provider Award for Customer Excellence.

It’s difficult to quantify how many lives a minute can save in the context of healthcare, where split-second decisions are often vital for patients.

But in the rural Georgia town of Thomaston, pop. 9,170, a deployment of cloud-based technology at URMC is showing its 750 employees first-hand just how much of a difference time and access can make when lives and quality of care are at stake.

“Giving physicians the ability to remotely access our EHR [Electronic Health Record] from anywhere at any time definitely improves patient care,” said Johnathan Buice, CIO at URMC. “It also frees us to think outside the box about how we deliver healthcare.”

As you might expect, a change of this magnitude did not happen overnight.  Marlborough, Massachusetts-based CloudWave, a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) partner, spent two months migrating critical healthcare applications to the cloud for stronger disaster recovery and integrated access. The results? Hospital staff now have access to both EHR and imaging systems under a single sign-on platform, boosting physician access to images from one minute to a few seconds.

The migration to CloudWave’s OpSus Healthcare Cloud boosted the availability of images in the EHR from 30 percent to 90 percent, all the while strengthening the system’s disaster recovery and information security while transferring the burden of IT deployment and maintenance to a trusted service provider.

Recent testing of URMC’s disaster recovery strategy revealed how highly effective this hybrid cloud strategy has been. “We went from having a disaster recovery solution that essentially preserved our data, to a fully functional EHR complete with imaging and supporting systems that allow us to operate at a level most organizations cannot during a disaster” said Buice. URMC’s new ability to see not only clinical documentation when navigating the health system, but also images, labs, and other clinical data illustrates the success of this ambitious, industry leading IT design.

“It was very ambitious for an IT staff of 15 in a rural hospital with 750 employees to take not one, but three major projects live in a cloud-based environment,” said Buice, referring to the MEDITECH 6.15, MEDITECH Web Ambulatory and Agfa upgrades. “With CloudWave, the infrastructure was designed and implemented expertly, and within two weeks of ‘go-live’ we were hearing positive feedback from our users. We are bleeding edge with this technology.”

“CloudWave takes pride in our expertise in migrating critical clinical systems such as MEDITECH and enterprise imaging applications” said Matt Donahue, CTO at CloudWave. “We understand that clinical users require a system of the highest performance with always on availability and an uncompromising security posture. It was a pleasure working with the URMC staff on this journey and we are proud they chose both us and HPE as their trusted partners.”

URMC provides general surgery, acute care, and specialty services, with its emergency room serving some 30,000 emergency visits a year and 3,000 patient admissions.

“There’s no other way to put it: CloudWave did a phenomenal job,” Buice said. “They spent two months working behind the scenes with Agfa to provide us the solution we wanted.”

Positive results thus far have led the medical center to think about what other healthcare applications could benefit from the power of the cloud with its OBIX Perinatal Data System being the most recent. URMC went live with OBIX, an application that helps with electronic fetal monitoring, and will be archiving fetal monitoring strips in the cloud. The application will be connected with Airstrip-their on premises mobile interoperability platform- enabling URMC to extend their hybrid IT solution to edge devices so clinicians can access fetal monitoring strips on their mobile phones.

“Eventually, we plan on aligning our cloud and on premises strategic designs to continue to evolve our hybrid IT strategy as a model others can benefit from.” said Buice.

URMC’s use of the OpSus Healthcare Cloud demonstrates the flexibility and enhanced performance cloud solutions provide resulting in improved integration, security, and clinician access to patient data.

 

 

 

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