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Novant Health Migrates Epic EHR To Healthcare Cloud Environment

Novant Health, a North Carolina-based health system, is migrating its Epic electronic health record (EHR) to a healthcare cloud computing environment to improve efficiencies and meet regulatory requirements.

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Source: Thinkstock

By Fred Donovan

- Novant Health, a North Carolina-based health system, is migrating its Epic electronic health record (EHR) to a healthcare cloud computing environment to improve efficiencies and meet regulatory requirements.

Novant Health was looking for a more predictable cost model and improved business speed and agility for its EHR. It also wanted to avoid the need to re-architect its EHR every time new changes were necessary.

After evaluating several cloud providers, Novant Health decided to partner with Virtustream, an enterprise cloud computing business of Dell Technologies, to move its Epic environment to the cloud.

Other key vendors in the global healthcare market, according to Zion Market Research, include Cisco, Allscripts, Athenahealth, IBM, GNAX Health, Microsoft, Iron Mountain, VMware, Qualcomm, and Oracle.

Novant Health is a multi-state integrated network of physician clinics, outpatient centers, and hospitals serving more than 5 million patients annually. The 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.

The company implemented Epic in 2011 to meet its growing EHR needs. But it realized its legacy environment and aging health IT infrastructure would not support its future expansion requirements.

“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, chief technology officer at 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,” Kluttz said.

Novant Health and Virtustream teams began their design discussions in mid-2018 and went live in early 2019.

Virtustream’s xStreamCare services provided end-to-end support, from the hypervisor to the core infrastructure. Its approach allowed Novant Health to be in production with Virtustream in just hours.

Novant Health’s future modernization efforts and system enhancements can now be seamlessly planned for, including application retirement, operational optimization, and migrating its integration engine with its millions of transactions per day to the 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 chief executive officer of Virtustream.

Healthcare Cloud Computing Market to Reach $62B by 2025

Zion Market Research forecasts that the global healthcare cloud computing market will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7 percent through 2025, when it will reach a market value of $62 billion.

Factors driving growth in healthcare cloud computing market include growing adoption of Internet of Things, wearable devices, big data analytics, high speed internet, novel payment models, rigorous regulatory compliance, and rising investment by healthcare providers in technology.

Cloud computing offers flexibility, better storage options, and data scalability. The implementation of favorable governing regulations, increasing public awareness, and efforts taken by governments are likely to create growth avenues for healthcare cloud computing market players, predicted Zion.

At the same time, data privacy issues, cloud data breaches, and complications related to data portability might limit growth of the healthcare cloud computing market.

Zion explained that the healthcare cloud computing market is segmented based on application, component, service model, deployment model, and end-user.

By application, the healthcare cloud computing market includes clinical information system and nonclinical information system. The component segment is broken down into software and services. The service model segment includes infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service models. The deployment segment includes public cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud. The end-user segment covers healthcare providers and healthcare payers.