Novant Health Transforms IT with Virtustream Cloud Solutions and Services to Future-proof its Healthcare Information Systems
July 11, 2019
Virtustream, an enterprise-class cloud company and a Dell Technologies business, announced today the successful migration of one of the industry’s largest Epic deployments to the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud. Novant Health, a leading regional, not-for-profit, integrated healthcare system, migrated its mission-critical applications to Virtustream’s cloud environment to improve business efficiencies and to better meet evolving electronic health record (EHR) regulations and requirements.
According to a Markets and Markets Healthcare Cloud Computing report, the global healthcare cloud computing market is projected to reach $44.93 billion by 2023 (up from $16.77 billion in 2017) at a CAGR of 18.2%. This is driven, in part, by an aging population in the United States and the rise of chronic diseases, fueling a need for IT innovation and cost containment. To meet these needs, many healthcare organizations, including Novant Health, are moving to the cloud for their mission-critical workloads, with EHR as one of the top priorities.
Serving communities across the Southeast, Novant Health is a multi-state integrated network of physician clinics, outpatient centers and hospitals that delivers a seamless healthcare experience to its community members. The Novant Health network consists of nearly 30,000 team members who provide care at 640 locations, including 15 medical centers and hundreds of outpatient facilities and physicians clinics. Headquartered in North Carolina, Novant Health serves more than five million patients annually. In 2011, the company implemented Epic to meet its growing EHR needs. Technology serves as the backbone of Novant Health’s expanding network of healthcare facilities and the organization realized its legacy environment and aging infrastructure would not support the future needs of its EHR platform.
The Novant Health technology team sought innovative solutions to meet their Epic application objectives, including a more predictable cost model and improved business speed and agility, while avoiding the need to completely re-architect its system every time new changes were necessary. After evaluating multiple cloud providers, Novant Health partnered with Virtustream to move its mission-critical Epic environment to the cloud, a move that also allows for future enhancements and modernization for years to come.
“Novant Health turned to Virtustream as our trusted cloud partner for its deep expertise when it comes to managing business-critical data like our electronic health records,” said James Kluttz, CTO, Novant Health. “We chose Virtustream to host our Epic environment in the cloud because it could meet all of our business, security, technical, and costs requirements. We look forward to leveraging Virtustream as a growth platform to execute our cloud strategy in the future.”
When Novant Health moved its production Epic environment to Virtustream earlier this year, it became one of the largest Epic deployments operating on a highly-secure cloud platform designed for the healthcare industry. Novant Health and Virtustream’s xStreamCare services teams began their design discussions in mid-2018 and went live in early 2019. Through a transparent and collaborative approach, Novant Health and Virtustream accomplished the cloud migration within six months of completing the technical architecture design. Virtustream’s xStreamCare services provided end-to-end support, from the hypervisor to the core infrastructure. Its comprehensive, single-hand-to-shake approach allowed Novant Health to be in production with Virtustream in just hours. Other future modernization efforts and system enhancements can now be seamlessly planned for, potentially including application retirement, operational optimization, and migrating Novant Health’s integration engine with its millions of transactions per day to the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud.
“At Virtustream, we put our enterprise customers first in everything that we do. With more predictable IT costs in place for Novant Health, and a faster, more agile cloud solution supporting its mission-critical IT needs, they can now focus on what matters most to them – delivering the best healthcare possible to the many communities they serve,” said Rory Read, president and CEO, Virtustream.
