Enabling Healthcare Organizations to focus on health instead of infrastructure.
Background
Baptist Memorial Health Care is one of the largest private hospital systems in the United States. It comprises seventeen hospitals, including an academic medical center, and numerous clinics and specialty locations. More than 3,100 physician providers across 34 specialties serve a mid-south population of 1.2 million patients.
Challenge
In response to the imperative for rapid growth and heightened resilience, Baptist Memorial Healthcare Corporation (BMHC) needed more resilient disaster recovery (DR) for its Epic EHR to ensure business continuity, improve security, and scale as needed. While exploring options, BMHC considered building a mirrored physical data center in an alternate location. However, that option would have come with hefty capital expenditures, lengthy deployment times, and the need for regular hardware refreshes. Realizing that this approach would not meet the urgent need for a more resilient DR solution, BMHC turned to the cloud.
- RPO of seconds
- RTO of < 2 hours
- Maintain 100% functionality during planned failover events
Solution
Optimum Healthcare IT demonstrated comprehensive program management, execution, and governance, ensuring successful outcomes. Their approach included:
- Implementation of best practice automation using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for Landing Zone (HLZA).
- Adoption of an elastic design resulting in a reduction of overall cloud consumption by over 50%.
- Development of a dependency-aware architecture considering complex relationships between Epic, third-party apps, external entities, and key integrations.
- Utilization of a custom testing methodology featuring progressive dry runs to validate all components, leading to the creation of a comprehensive runbook.
- Implementation of a phased activation approach to mitigate risks, with Test-Flight #1 involving 24-hour lower volume activities and Test-Flight #2 encompassing 7-day full-scale volumes.
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*Epic is a trademark of Epic Systems Corporation
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