For Suncoast Community Health Centers, moving to a cloud-based EHR was a no-brainer. Not only did is save them money, but it also reduced staff frustration and stress. The move also helped improve the organization’s resilience through better redundancy and disaster recovery. With careful planning, cross-department collaboration, and help from their EHR partner, eClinicalWorks, the migration to the cloud was seamless.
Healthcare IT Today sat down with Dorrie Paquin-Brown, Director of Special Projects at Suncoast Community Health Centers (SCHC) and Edward Martinbor, CIO at SCHC to learn more about their impetus to move to the cloud and the benefits they have realized.
SCHC is a federally qualified health center (FQHC) that has been serving their community since 1977. In 2022, they looked after 62,000 patients across 205,000 encounters. SCHC provide a multitude of services including: primary, dental, optometry, chiropractic, vision, and behavioral health services.
On-premise EHR Was Causing Stress
“When we were hosting our own systems, there was a lot of stress on our clinicians and IT staff when it would go down,” stated Paquin-Brown. “Our IT staff had to work overly hard to make sure we were back up quickly, but it didn’t always happen.”
When Martinbor joined SCHC in 2013, the organization was hosting their EHR on their own servers in a scattered set of data centers. Martinbor immediately went to work consolidating and streamlined the servers. This improved performance and reduced downtime for a while.
“It became challenging to keep up with performance,” shared Martinbor. “When I came onboard, we had 245 employees. We quickly grew to over 400. Our servers couldn’t keep up, especially because we were not just running the eClinicalWorks EHR. Our servers were also running other subsystems, our accounting packages, our file storage, and more.”
Right-sizing their servers and data center infrastructure would have required a $400K investment. Smartly, Martinbor decided to investigate the possibility of moving to the cloud rather than subjecting his small team and the staff at SCHC to a lengthy and stressful upgrade process.
Moving to a Cloud-Based EHR Made Sense
“At first, we considered moving to our own private cloud hosted on Azure,” admitted Martinbor. “But if we went down that road, we would have to build up all those servers. We could have done it, but it would have taken us a year or more and Dorrie and her team would not have been happy about that.”
Instead, the SCHC chose to work with the eClinicalWorks team to migrate to the full cloud version of their EHR. Martinbor crunched the numbers and moving to the cloud would save SCHC from having to hire additional IT staff to maintain server infrastructure. Plus, it would “future-proof” the organization so that as staff was added, more hardware would not need to b purchased.
Since SCHC had been using eClinicalWorks since 2009, they had a lot of data that had to be migrated. The eClinicalWorks technical team worked closely with SCHC to make that migration seamless.
Improved Resiliency and Less Stress
One of the benefits of moving to eClinicalWorks’ cloud EHR, was the improvement to SCHC’s disaster preparedness.
When SCHC was hosting their own servers, Martinbor estimates that they could quickly bring up ¼ of their server capacity in a disaster. They had the backups, but lacked the compute resources to be fully operational if their main data center went offline.
“We knew that by moving to the cloud, the eClinicalWorks team would take care of the backups,” said Martinbor. “They would going to take care of the redundancy so that in case anything happened, we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
This improved resiliency offers SCHC peace of mind.
“Moving to the cloud was the best thing we ever did,” stated Paquin-Brown. “It’s like having the eClinicalWorks team in a box. With one touch we are able to talk to them and tell them if we were having a down issue or a slowness issue. They would immediately be on top of it and resolve it quickly. It’s a big relief.”
Watch the interview with Dorrie Paquin-Brown and Edward Martinbor to learn:
- Exactly where SCHC was going to save money by moving to the cloud
- How seamlessly the migration to the cloud went for the clinical teams
- Why SCHC put one of their IT staff on a plane to hand-deliver a hard drive to eClinicalWorks
Learn more about Suncoast Community Health Centers at https://suncoast-chc.org/
Learn more about eClinicalWorks at https://www.eclinicalworks.com/
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