About the customer
Beebe Healthcare is a not-for-profit community healthcare system located in Sussex County, Delaware. Established in 1916, Beebe has grown to include a hospital, a cancer center, outpatient facilities, and numerous specialty practices, serving the rapidly growing population of the region. Beebe Healthcare is committed to providing high-quality, patient-centered care and investing in the technology and infrastructure needed to support modern healthcare delivery.
Migration Objective
Beebe Healthcare’s migration and strategic modernization initiative was designed to implement a new EHR hosted in AWS and build a resilient, cloud-based clinical platform. The effort was more than a system change — it was a strategic transformation to:
- Support the new EHR and more than a dozen dependent clinical and operational applications without service interruptions.
- Strengthen disaster recovery from hours to minutes to meet modern clinical continuity expectations.
- Improve flexibility to accommodate new EHR modules, third-party integrations, and advanced analytics workloads without costly hardware refreshes.
The project was guided by a central principle: every decision in the migration plan had to be justified not just technically, but in terms of its impact on patient care, clinician workflow, and long-term operational efficiency.
Proposed Solution
Sublimation Health led the design and execution of Beebe Healthcare’s migration, building an AWS-based environment to host the new EHR and more than a dozen integrated clinical and operational applications. The project followed a healthcare-specific migration approach grounded in the AWS Well-Architected Framework and the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF), ensuring operational readiness, security, and scalability from day one.
We conducted a comprehensive assessment of Beebe’s existing environment, mapping all clinical and operational dependencies so that every integration, data flow, and workflow requirement was addressed. These findings informed the architecture of a multi-account AWS environment featuring segmented networks, role-based access controls, and compliance-ready configurations aligned with healthcare security and availability standards.
Migration planning emphasized application interoperability and resilience. Third-party applications were migrated alongside the EHR, each right-sized for both performance and cost efficiency. Data synchronization between AWS and on-premises systems continued until final cutover, enabling a seamless transition without disruption to hospital operations. The resulting platform ensures uninterrupted access to critical patient information even during power outages, network failures, or site-level disruptions.
Results and Benefits
Beebe Healthcare’s migration to AWS delivered measurable benefits compared to its legacy on-premises infrastructure, directly addressing the hospital’s goals around resilience, agility, and modernization. Key outcomes included:
- Disaster recovery activation time decreased from over 4 hours to less than 12 minutes, enabling clinical teams to regain access to critical systems nearly 20x faster during unplanned disruptions.
- Infrastructure-related operating costs were reduced by 38% through the elimination of physical server maintenance, lower power consumption, and the adoption of cloud-native storage and compute right-sizing.
- Average deployment time for new environments dropped from six weeks to under 30 minutes. More than a dozen environments were deployed in minutes during the project — including staging, production, and integration layers for the EHR and related applications. Previously, this required lengthy approval chains, hardware procurement, and manual setup.
- Onboarding time for new EHR modules and third-party applications was reduced by 60%, enabling the IT team to deliver new clinical tools in days instead of weeks — significantly accelerating the hospital’s ability to bring innovation to patient care.
- New initiatives were tested and validated rapidly, without needing to purchase and provision physical infrastructure. This flexibility allowed Beebe to experiment with new services at low cost and minimal risk, making it easier to determine technical fit and clinical value early in the lifecycle.
- Legacy hardware refresh costs avoided: The migration eliminated the need for a ~$750K on-premises infrastructure upgrade that had been scheduled for the upcoming fiscal year.
- Zero downtime during go-live: The cutover was executed without any disruption to clinical operations, supported by continuous replication and real-time validation between on-prem and AWS environments.
- Improved scalability and analytics readiness: The AWS-hosted environment allows Beebe to scale workloads dynamically and integrate data across systems, enabling future expansion into advanced analytics and machine learning — capabilities that were not feasible in the previous environment.
About Sublimation Health
Sublimation Health is a healthcare focused cloud technology solutions provider built by professionals who have worked inside hospitals, supporting mission critical systems and clinical workflows. That perspective shapes everything we do, from designing resilient architectures to ensuring migrations happen without disrupting patient care. We specialize in moving entire healthcare ecosystems, including electronic health record systems and dependent third-party applications, into a secure, high performance cloud platform.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner with the AWS Healthcare Competency, a distinction held by the top 0.2% of AWS partners, we combine deep industry knowledge with proven technical expertise. Our team provides ongoing managed services to keep ecosystems optimized, secure, and ready to support the evolving needs of modern healthcare organizations so on-site teams can stay focused on delivering care while we manage the infrastructure.