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Health information technology (HIT) is a fast-growing field in which many companies are adapting to the new digital frontier. As a result, the global health IT market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.7% until 2028 and reach a market value of $166 billion. This rapid increase indicates the need for companies to begin adopting new digital strategies to improve workplace efficiency and patient outcomes.
Moving to the cloud can provide your organization with increased security, time and money savings on employee resources, an expansion of your remote workforce, and heightened efficiency and speed in your general processes. Many cloud platforms include a variety of security features that can better protect your organization’s resources and provide backup and recovery capabilities.
If you find yourself contemplating a move to the cloud, you might consider whether migrating Epic Systems onto Amazon Web Services (AWS) could benefit your business. To get a more in-depth perspective, let’s take a deeper dive into IT to determine what Epic on AWS can do for your organization.
What Can Epic on AWS Do For My Organization?
Regardless of what you already know about Epic and AWS, you may not be aware of the added features and functionality you could achieve with a migration. There are a multitude of benefits unlocked by the shift that could help you and your organization, including:
- A reduction in operating costs by leveraging the elasticity of the cloud
- On-demand training deployment and termination to minimize resource use
- Continuous validation and optimization of Epic environments
- Flexible accommodations to meet consumer demands
- IT automation
These benefits are optimal in the following environments: testing, developing, training, and disaster recovery. Additionally, when deciding to go this route, you will have an AWS account team and an Epic Technical Coordinator at your service to support you and your organization and help decide your best course of action to promote your specific needs.
A Fully Customizable Platform
What if the platform and migration are not enough to suit your organization’s needs? AWS offers a surplus of modules that can be added to your AWS account. These modules cover a variety of areas, including:
- Disease Management
- Healthcare Analytics & Datasets
- Clinical Information Systems
- IT Infrastructure
- Interoperability
- Healthcare Compliance
Migrating Epic onto AWS will provide you with many opportunities to improve your organization’s IT structure, making life easier for your IT team. In addition, you can enhance your capabilities to provide patients with the best possible care while staying compliant and secure under the AWS platform.
Patient Outcomes
Migrating Epic to AWS can help speed up diagnoses, streamline therapeutic discovery, accelerate the development of medicines, and perform genomic analysis while remaining compliant and secure. But one of the most important aspects to consider is how the migration will affect patient care outcomes.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rush University Medical Center worked with AWS to create a cloud-based analytics hub using AWS for health services, like Amazon HealthLake. This hub allows for secure analyses of patient admissions, discharges, and hospital capacity via real-time dashboards to provide care for the most critically ill patients. Rush is now applying learnings from this effort toward achieving its mission to provide personalized care and improve health equity for all individuals they serve.
Using the HealthLake API, Rush can leverage predictive models around social determinants of health across Chicago’s West Side to help identify and fill care gaps before they occur. As a result, migrating to AWS is assisting Rush to provide safer and more efficient experiences for its patients. A migration could have similar outcomes for your organization and your patients, too.
Making the Migration
Providing better and more secure accessibility to your team becomes easier when you decide to make the switch. Providers, payors, and healthcare IT can all securely use the features and services of Epic on AWS. Suppose you’re thinking about beginning the migration of Epic onto AWS—how do you begin?
First, you should meet with your Epic representative to review your Epic Cloud specification guide. Next, you will schedule a meeting with an AWS solution architect to support a well-established IT design. The AWS account representative would then form a total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) analysis — with the help of CloudChomp or TSO Logic — to ensure there is a sound plan in place. Finally, the AWS team will provide a proof of concept, and at the end stages, you will be required to support the migration to ensure that it runs seamlessly.
If you’re ready to make the transition to the cloud, you should reach out to a professional consultant with expert knowledge to help reduce AWS certification costs and receive training support for your team. Oxford is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner prepared to assist you and your organization should you decide to begin the migration to the cloud. To learn more about Epic on AWS, refer to Part I.