Seattle Children’s Leverages Virtustream’s Expertise to Successfully Migrate EHR Application to the Cloud While Working Completely Remotely Due to Pandemic-related Restrictions
Virtustream, an enterprise-class cloud company and Dell Technologies business, announced that Seattle Children’s successfully unified two distinct electronic health record (EHR) platforms into a single Epic system on the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud. With expert support provided by Virtustream’s xStreamCare Services™ for EHR Platform, the newly unified system provides secure and easy access to patient data across the Epic platform for thousands of clinicians and staff members with increased efficiency and more predictable lower costs.
Seattle Children’s specializes in meeting the unique physical, emotional and developmental needs of children from infancy through young adulthood. It is one of the largest children’s hospitals in the U.S. and provides services throughout 46 locations in Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.
“Now is the time for clinical systems to securely and efficiently run in the cloud,” said Dr. Zafar Chaudry, senior vice president and CIO, Seattle Children’s. “The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud enables Seattle Children’s to focus on our rapidly changing business needs and, most importantly, on our patient care priorities. Virtustream’s expertise and mission-critical cloud platform allow us to be more agile and scale faster in ways that traditionally took too long and were too expensive. Virtustream played a key role in our successful migration to Epic during a very hectic time for our healthcare system as we dealt with work-from-home requirements and more pressing issues related to the pandemic, and I’ve come to greatly value our trusted partnership.”
Completed late last year, the EHR consolidation and migration project included a Cerner EHR application running in the Cerner cloud and the Epic Revenue Cycle application running on-premises. The move provides all of Seattle Children’s physical and remote locations with secure and efficient unified access to health records. About 3,500 clinicians and staff members are using the Epic system concurrently today on the highly secure Virtustream Healthcare Cloud to view patient health information and refer patients. With this number expected to grow to 5,000 and beyond, Virtustream’s cloud solution has been designed to enable easy agility and scalability based on the health system’s plans for future growth.
While Working Completely Remotely, Virtustream’s xStreamCare Services Drive Successful Cloud Migration of Cerner and Epic EHR Applications to Single, Unified Epic System
Due to the ongoing requirements of the pandemic, Virtustream’s consultants and Seattle Children’s IT staff migrated the health system’s data completely virtually from multiple remote locations. Merging two separate EHR systems can be a complex project, especially when they are running in two different operating environments. In this case, it was also imperative that staff continue to have uninterrupted access to critical patient and business records during the migration.
Unifying Seattle Children’s two distinct platforms on the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud helped the health system achieve more predictable costs and reduce capital expenditures by consuming infrastructure as a service on an as-needed basis. The hospital selected Virtustream, which works with several leading healthcare organizations, because its healthcare cloud is designed to help healthcare organizations address HIPAA/HITECH and SOC2+HITRUST compliance. Furthermore, Virtustream’s security management and monitoring services provide an additional layer of enterprise-level protection for Seattle Children’s data and applications. And, finally, the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud provides availability service-level agreements up to 99.999% at the infrastructure level, or less than 6 minutes of unplanned downtime a year.
With xStreamCare Services, Virtustream operates and manages the infrastructure for the hospital’s Epic EHR system as well as many other ancillary and supporting applications. This empowers the hospital’s internal IT staff to focus on other strategic projects, including patient care initiatives. For example, with Virtustream managing the cloud, the internal IT team is able to focus on more patient-centric priorities, including real-time analytics to help manage the business, track infection rates, view patient queues and provide secure access across the health system.
“Our goal is always to be our customers’ most strategic IT partner,” says Dr. Tim Calahan, Director of Healthcare Product Strategy & Management, Virtustream. “With Seattle Children’s, Virtustream has stepped in to provide a highly efficient, agile and scalable cloud solution supported by our enterprise-class security, compliance and expert managed services that every healthcare organization should demand in these times.”
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