IT Accelerates in Response to the Pandemic – A Case Study of How One Health System Got their Data Center Migration Done Right

It’s been fascinating to watch how rapidly new technology and digital solutions have been implemented during the pandemic to address massive changes in healthcare. This has ranged from quickly enabling thousands of new clinicians and non-clinicians to remote working infrastructure, to huge increases in virtual visits and telehealth, to implementing all kinds of new clinical workstreams and analytics supporting COVID-19 efforts.

Hospital IT leaders have had to be nimble, available and flexible to adapt our their systems, technologies and processes in support of their community and front-line caregivers.

We recently worked with Baptist Health, a rapidly growing network of hospitals and healthcare facilities based in Louisville, Kentucky. They were confronted with multiple hospital and medical practice acquisitions, an aging data center with a lack of redundancy, and the need to convert more space into medical labs which quickly resulted in their outgrowing their existing data center.

The organization established ambitious plans to improve the health of its IT infrastructure with a seamlessly executed data center migration without impacting their top-quality patient care. And they were determined that it had to be executed despite the devastating impact of COVID-19.

Like many organizations working quickly to expand their business, adopt new technology to keep pace with consumer and clinical demands, and maintain strict regulatory requirements, Baptist Health faced many challenges.

1. How could they get a full picture of their consolidated IT data?
2. Without a central source, how could the team make the decisions necessary for such a complex project?
3. How would they keep control of inherently sensitive nature of patients’ records and the rigorous compliance regulations they are governed by?
4. How could they be certain they’d keep up with the day-to-day IT management – even more intense under the increasing demands from the pandemic – and still make their timeline, without disrupting patient care?

Read the full case study here.