Healthcare beyond the cloud: How to optimize both cost and care


EY and Providence journey to the cloud to improve the patient and employee experience while becoming more sustainable and innovative.


In brief

  • How does cloud data management benefit hospitals and patients? With better patient care, cutting-edge computing and restoring precious space to clinical use. 
  • Ernst & Young LLP Consulting Principal, Alicia Johnson and Providence CIO, B.J. Moore, discuss the next data evolution in healthcare.

In January of 2020, Providence received the very first COVID-19 patient in the United States and luckily were already in process of cloud migration. If that happened a year earlier and they were still on premise, they wouldn't have had those basic capabilities to really serve the community. The work that EY had done with Providence IT allowed them to scale effectively. They were able to leverage the bandwidth and hyper compute of the cloud. Using the advanced tools, Providence was able to predict where precious resources like PPE and ventilators were needed and move those precious resources around.

EY was a natural choice to bring in the digital components as well as the healthcare expertise that I needed to be successful.

In healthcare, by putting a data center in the hospital you're taking precious real estate and using it for non-clinical care. Being on premise also means missing out on all the innovations happening in the cloud – like machine learning and artificial intelligence. Providence and EY teams worked together to set up a repeatable cloud migration factory to migrate applications from on-prem over to Azure Cloud.

Instead of just lifting and shifting, an extensive inventory was done and 60% of legacy applications were retired. In 2021 alone, Providence reduced energy consumption equivalent to 800 homes in the Seattle area and reduced storage needs about the equivalent of seven times the Library of Congress.

Providence reduced energy consumption equivalent to 800 homes and reduced storage the equivalent of seven times the Library of Congress.


Summary

EY and Providence teams aligned on the security and the safety of moving data to the cloud. EY teams also worked in educating them with the skills to continue doing this. When that journey to the cloud is complete, Providence will be able to focus on their core competencies and build great solutions for patients and caregivers.

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