Over the past few years, the promised benefits of a cloud environment have encouraged many healthcare organizations to move their Epic workloads to the public cloud. These healthcare organizations are looking for reliability, security, and potential future cost savings as well as unique platform features only available in the cloud.
Last year, KLAS published a perception report evaluating the decision-making process of organizations considering moving their Epic solutions to the cloud. This year, KLAS gathered data on the results of those decisions and the successes of cloud deployments and published our findings in this recently published report.
The Rise of the Cloud
Just three years ago, the first announcements about healthcare organizations moving their solutions to the cloud began to surface. Around a year later, some prominent healthcare organizations also made the switch, sparking a lot of interest in the market.
That’s where KLAS comes in. It’s important for us to collect and share organizations’ cloud experiences so others can use that information to make good decisions.
Over the past year, the public cloud market has matured as more people have migrated to the cloud. It still has more maturing to do, but we are grateful to be able to provide some insights now to help guide healthcare organizations in their decisions.
Insights from the Report
The report addresses many of the concerns that healthcare organizations have about moving to the cloud, including end user response time, reliability, interoperability, and cost.
With shared experiences from organizations who are live with Epic workloads in the cloud, this report provides insights into the following topics:
- Why organizations are choosing the cloud
- What Epic workloads organizations are considering moving to the cloud (i.e., disaster recovery, training, and even full production settings)
- The impacts of moving Epic to the cloud
- Next steps after moving Epic to the cloud
We also wanted to provide an overview of how well AWS and Microsoft Azure are performing. All interviewed organizations are using one of these two cloud providers.
There were noticeable differences between AWS and Microsoft Azure in terms of technology and support. However, considering how big and broad the cloud transition process is, we were pleased to find that, overall, organizations are satisfied with their respective cloud provider. Many said that since switching, system response time and reliability have remained the same or even improved. Larger organizations have also found that the cloud is able to scale to fit their needs in a production environment.
Also of note, many organizations are leveraging third-party firms to help with the cloud, whether that be for up-front planning, migration, or ongoing environment management. Not a lot of people have cloud expertise, so being able to bring in a specialized third-party firm is something healthcare organizations should consider when deciding whether to make the switch.
The Future of the Public Cloud
With the results that healthcare organizations are currently seeing and the cloud’s promised outcomes, KLAS expects the market to grow significantly over the next three years.
There is also room for the market to change. Organizations that have moved their Epic workloads to the cloud wanted to improve system performance and reliability and eventually reduce capital infrastructure expenditures and overall costs. Although the technology continues to evolve rapidly and Epic clients are reducing their capital infrastructure costs, moving a full Epic production environment to the cloud is currently more expensive than hosting it on-premises. Still, many organizations anticipate that the costs will decrease as they learn how to better optimize the cloud environment. As always, KLAS hopes to publish more data on cloud providers and usage in the coming years.
To learn more insights on these two cloud providers, be sure to read the report.
© Jacob Lund / Adobe Stock
