When I look back at the history of EHR software, it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come. Especially when it comes to how an EHR is hosted. When I first started writing about the EHR industry, a large portion of the industry was client server based software that was hosted at the healthcare organization’s data center. Cloud based EHR were just getting started. Now, every EHR vendor is pushing a cloud based approach to their EHR.
Even more nuanced to this was getting EHR vendors to embrace things like virtualization which were becoming so important to system administrators in other applications. The power of virtualization which was really brought mainstream by companies like VMware was happening across the IT stack, but many EHR vendors were resistant. I remember hearing about some EHR vendors that strictly forbade a healthcare organization from putting their EHR on a virtual server.
While it’s always fun to look back at history, I’m happy to say that we’re at a very different place today. A great example of this was illustrated in a recent video interview I did with Matt Douglas, Chief Enterprise Architect at Sentara and Optima Health and Chris Logan, Executive Healthcare Advisor at VMware. You can check out the full interview at the bottom of this article.
In the interview, Douglas shares why Sentara and Optima Health made the decision to move their Epic EHR to VMware vSphere and vSAN running on the Azure cloud. That’s a big decision for any organization. In fact, I asked Douglas if he was worried about virtualizing such an important application and moving it to the cloud. His response highlighted something we often forget. Not moving to a modern architecture that includes virtualization and the cloud carries many risks as well. In fact, they were able to lower their operating costs by moving to a virtualized solution in the cloud along with having a modern infrastructure that provides flexibility for the future.
Anytime we’re talking about the cloud, I always have to ask about the impact this move has had on the end users. Many fear that the cloud just won’t be fast enough or reliable enough for an application like Epic’s EHR, but Douglas confirmed that they’ve had no issues with end users having trouble with their new backend architecture.
Along with sharing their experience virtualizing their Epic EHR and moving it to the cloud, Douglas also shared what it was like doing this project amidst COVID. While it was certainly a challenge, he not surprisingly highlighted how the new infrastructure’s flexibility was something that was highly valued amidst COVID.
If you want to learn more about moving Epic to a virtual solution from VMware in the Azure Cloud, you’ll enjoy this interview.
Learn more about VMware: https://www.vmware.com/solutions/industry/healthcare-it-solutions.html
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