Smoothing the Epic Migration to AWS at Geisinger

Geisinger, a major health care provider and medical education center, has what is probably the largest public cloud-based instance of Epic in the industry. In this video interview with Marlin Moyer, Associate Vice President of Electronic Health Records and Clinical Systems at Geisinger, offer details about the planning and execution of their move to AWS, and the benefits they’ve experienced.

Geisinger still maintains two data centers, but found that managing large applications on-premises was becoming increasingly costly and complex. They have succeeded in moving 40% of their servers with most of their applications to AWS. The reason they can’t move all their applications is that some vendors don’t yet support cloud instances.

The move required working with both AWS and Epic, especially due to the size of the installation. Epic helped Geisinger think ahead to what they needed to do.

They performed rigorous testing for response time. And indeed, their customers noted and praised them immediately for improvements in that area.

Other benefits of the cloud, for Geisinger as for many users, were reduced costs and easier scalability. If a research project needs heavy computing resources for a short period of time, they can scale up and down as needed. Dealing with de-identified data safely in the cloud is easy.

More long-term, Moyer says, “the future requires exploiting new technology sooner,” which cloud computing facilitates.

The biggest barrier to moving, Moyer says, was overcoming anxiety among their data analysts and executives about preserving stability. The company listened and addressed their issues as one of the first steps in the process.

Moyer advises companies planning a migration to look at their “whole landscape,” such as security and accounting. He says that one thing he would do differently, if he had to make such a move again, would be to spin up a strong FinOps program so they could evaluate the costs and savings better.

Learn more about Geisinger: https://www.geisinger.org/

Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.

And for an exclusive look at our top stories, subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube.

Tell us what you think. Contact us here or on Twitter at @hcitoday. And if you’re interested in advertising with us, check out our various advertising packages and request our Media Kit.