About the customer
Lowell General Hospital, located in Lowell, Massachusetts, is a key institution in the healthcare industry, serving a diverse community with a broad range of medical services. It operates as a full-service healthcare facility, encompassing emergency care, inpatient units, and extensive outpatient services. The hospital is equipped with state-of-the-art radiology and MRI facilities, and it hosts a Patient Service Center that provides various outpatient testing needs. As a significant provider of healthcare in the region, Lowell General Hospital is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through advanced medical treatments and comprehensive care programs, while also focusing on public health education and preventive measures. This establishment plays a vital role in the local healthcare system, addressing both acute and long-term health needs of the population it serves.
Lowell General Hospital is confronted with the compound challenge of providing high-quality medical services while managing efficient non-clinical operations such as nutritional services, environmental cleanliness, and facilities management. These critical support services significantly influence patient recovery, satisfaction, and safety. However, inefficiencies in these domains can degrade patient experiences, elevate infection rates, and overburden medical staff. Additionally, the hospital faces significant hurdles related to its current on-premises physical data centers, which host the infrastructure for solutions aimed at addressing these operational challenges. The limitations and challenges of maintaining on-premises data centers, including high maintenance costs, limited scalability, and vulnerability to disruptions, exacerbate the hospital's operational issues. There is an urgent necessity for Lowell General Hospital to implement an integrated solution that not only optimizes non-clinical operations but also transitions away from problematic on-premises infrastructure to more flexible, secure, and cost-effective cloud-based systems, thereby allowing healthcare professionals to concentrate on delivering superior patient care.
If Lowell General Hospital does not address these challenges, it may face severe repercussions that could compromise patient care and operational efficiency. The persistence of inefficiencies in non-clinical operations could lead to decreased patient satisfaction, higher rates of hospital-acquired infections, and an overburdened clinical staff, detracting from the hospital's ability to provide high-quality care. Furthermore, the continued reliance on outdated on-premises data center infrastructure could exacerbate these problems by limiting the hospital's ability to implement and leverage modern solutions for these operational challenges. This could result in increased operational costs, reduced flexibility in responding to technological advancements, and heightened risks of data breaches or system failures. Failure to address these issues could ultimately lead to a decline in the hospital's reputation, patient trust, and financial stability, impacting its overall ability to serve the community effectively.
Sublimation Health embarked on a strategic partnership with Lowell General Hospital to tackle the pressing challenges faced by the hospital in both clinical and non-clinical operations, particularly focusing on the efficient hosting of the Sodexo application, which is critical in managing the hospital's non-clinical services. Recognizing the limitations of the hospital's existing on-premises infrastructure, Sublimation Health proposed a solution leveraging AWS Cloud Hosting, aiming to enhance operational efficiency, scalability, and security.
The transition to AWS Cloud Hosting began with the deployment of Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), providing scalable computing capacity for hosting the hospital's Sodexo application. This move significantly improved the performance and reliability of non-clinical services management, ensuring that nutritional services, environmental cleanliness, and facilities management could be conducted more effectively and seamlessly. Alongside, Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) was implemented to offer high- performance block storage, which ensured that data storage was both scalable and reliable, supporting the continuous and intensive data needs of the Sodexo application.
To ensure a secure and isolated environment for Lowell General Hospital's applications and data, Sublimation Health utilized Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), enabling the creation of a private network within the AWS cloud. This not only enhanced security but also provided the hospital with control over its virtual networking environment. Additionally, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) was integrated to manage access to AWS services securely, ensuring that only authorized users could access the hospital’s cloud resources.
Sublimation Health further fortified the hospital's cloud infrastructure by implementing AWS GuardDuty for continuous monitoring and detection of threats and unauthorized behavior, ensuring the security and integrity of patient data and hospital operations. AWS Config was used to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of AWS resources, which helped in maintaining an optimal and compliant environment in line with healthcare regulations.
To automate and streamline the deployment and management of AWS resources, Sublimation Health adopted AWS Infrastructure as Code, which allowed for consistent and efficient management of the infrastructure through code, reducing manual errors and increasing operational reliability. Additionally, AWS CloudWatch was deployed for real-time monitoring and operational insights, enabling proactive responses to system-wide performance changes or issues.
Through Sublimation Health's full lifecycle managed services, Lowell General Hospital has not only transitioned to a more robust and scalable cloud-based infrastructure but also continues to receive ongoing support and optimization of its cloud resources. Sublimation Health's comprehensive approach ensures that the hospital's AWS cloud environment remains secure, compliant, and aligned with the evolving needs of healthcare service delivery, enabling Lowell General Hospital to focus more on providing high-quality patient care while relying on a modern, efficient, and secure infrastructure.
Results and Benefits
Sublimation Health's engagement with Lowell General Hospital marked a pivotal transition for the hospital from an outdated on-premises infrastructure to a modern, cloud-based solution tailored to meet the demands of contemporary healthcare services. This strategic partnership was designed to address the hospital's critical challenges, including inefficiencies in non-clinical operations and the limitations posed by aging data center facilities. By implementing a comprehensive AWS cloud solution, Sublimation Health enabled the hospital to optimize its operational processes, particularly in managing the Sodexo application for non-clinical services, thereby enhancing overall patient care and satisfaction.
The outcomes of this collaboration were significant and measurable. Post-implementation, Lowell General Hospital reported a 50% reduction in operational costs associated with its non-clinical services, attributed to the elimination of on-premises hardware maintenance and reduced energy consumption. The security of hospital data saw marked improvements, with AWS GuardDuty and IAM ensuring enhanced data protection and access control, mitigating the risks of data breaches and unauthorized access. The cloud infrastructure's fault tolerance capabilities ensured that the hospital's critical applications remained operational, with downtime reduced by over 98%, significantly impacting patient care continuity and service reliability. Moreover, by adopting AWS Infrastructure as Code, the time to deploy new services or make infrastructure changes was cut in half, enabling the hospital to respond more swiftly to evolving healthcare demands and regulatory requirements.
Overall, the engagement with Sublimation Health has provided Lowell General Hospital with a robust, secure, and scalable cloud infrastructure that not only meets the current needs of the hospital but also positions it for future growth and innovation in the healthcare sector. The transition to AWS cloud services has set a new standard for operational efficiency, security, and patient service delivery, underscoring the critical role of digital transformation in enhancing healthcare outcomes.
Cost Savings:
- Before Migration: $5,000/month
- After Migration: $3,000/month
- Target: Reduce costs by 40% within 6 months post-migration.
Migration Time:
- Total Planned Migration Time: 8 weeks.
- Actual Migration Time: Target is 8 ± 10% weeks.
Cloud Resource Utilization:
- Pre-Migration CPU Utilization: 70%
- Post-Migration CPU Utilization: Target 50-60%
- Target: Optimize resource utilization to be within 50-60%.
Security and Compliance:
- Compliance Violations Pre-Migration: 5 incidents.
- Compliance Violations Post-Migration: ≤ 1 incident.
- Target: Reduce compliance violations by 80% within 6 months.
Availability and Reliability:
- System Uptime Pre-Migration: 98%.
- System Uptime Post-Migration: ≥ 99.99%.
- Target: Increase uptime, with fewer than 2 unexpected downtimes within 6 months.
Scalability and Elasticity:
- Time to Scale Out Resources Pre-Migration: 30 minutes.
- Time to Scale Out Resources Post-Migration: ≤ 5 minutes.
- Target: Reduce time to scale resources by 83%.
Innovation and Agility:
- Average Time to Market Pre-Migration: 60 days.
- Average Time to Market Post-Migration: ≤ 30 days.
- Target: Reduce average time to market by 50% post-migration.
About the Partner
Sublimation Health is dedicated to enabling healthcare providers to achieve better patient care by leveraging the public cloud ecosystem, thereby enhancing efficiency, value, resiliency, and affordability. Our expertise is underscored by our successful implementation of the first full-scale Epic’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system and vital third-party applications in the public cloud. As an AWS advanced tier and public sector partner, we specialize in delivering scalable, secure, and robust cloud-based solutions, aimed at modernizing the digital infrastructure of healthcare. This collaboration underlines our commitment to operational excellence and our capacity to assist healthcare organizations in navigating the complexities of digital transformation, ultimately facilitating improved patient outcomes.