Healthcare providers are increasingly adopting adaptable infrastructure to improve patient care, as shown by Legacy Health in Portland, Oregon. Facing challenges such as outdated systems, growing cybersecurity risks, and financial constraints, the organization sought a new strategy to maintain its Epic electronic health record (EHR) system.
Their IT team found that their virtualization software was no longer supported by Epic, necessitating a replatforming of their critical application. They opted to run the Epic database as a virtualized workload on their existing Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and adopted Everpure for storage, using the NVMe over TCP protocol to transfer data across their Ethernet network.
Hybrid Storage Solutions Minimize Costs
This hybrid storage approach enabled Legacy Health to utilize existing technologies, reducing capital expenditure. Curtis Stoecklin, IT platform manager, noted the importance of cost management in nonprofit healthcare: “I like to joke that in nonprofit healthcare, we know the name of every dollar that we spend.”
The new architecture streamlined management and provided immutable snapshots, automatically backed up to Microsoft Azure, ensuring patient data availability during emergencies.
Legacy Health is among healthcare’s true pioneers when it comes to modernizing storage and data protection. It deployed adaptable infrastructure to keep up with technology and cybersecurity while providing a rock-solid foundation for patient care. Today, Heynderickx and Stoecklin regularly talk to other IT leaders about the benefits of an architecture that treats storage and data management consistently across on-premises and cloud environments.
Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester Research, pointed out that hardware costs dominate on-premises storage expenses. He noted that the increasing value of data has made resilience a key priority for enterprises.
Security and Scalability Drive Infrastructure Changes
Franciscan Health, operating 11 hospitals in Indiana and Illinois, migrated its Epic EHR to Azure Virtual Machines to enhance scalability and security. Jay Bhat, former CISO, explained that the Azure environment allowed them to integrate security controls from the outset, providing failover capabilities to maintain system availability during outages.
The migration improved visibility into systems and data movement, along with better workload segmentation. Franciscan Health now employs a mix of cloud and on-premises technologies, placing workloads based on patient care requirements.
Atlantic Health, with nearly 6,000 affiliated physicians, eight hospitals, and more than 550 sites of care, relies on Epic Hosting for its EHR. With data-intensive applications like their picture archiving and communication system (PACS), efficient and affordable storage is essential.
In partnership with Everpure, Atlantic Health deployed FlashArray storage arrays, ensuring data protection through immutable snapshots and encryption. This solution enables regular PACS upgrades without disruptions and scales to meet growing capacity demands.
By storing frequently accessed images at the point of care and moving older studies to a cloud data warehouse, Atlantic Health balances patient care with cost efficiency. The organization’s focus remains on modern infrastructure to support patient care, led by Meraz Nasir.
Data Sovereignty and Security in Healthcare IT
Atlantic Health is actively expanding through new facility construction, acquisitions, and partnerships, requiring advanced technology and data storage solutions. Nasir emphasizes the importance of collaborating with vendors that provide modern infrastructure.
