Sign in to my dashboard Create an account
Menu

Cure cost concerns with EHR infrastructure

doctor taking temperature
Contents

Share this page

Brian Omahoney
Brian O'Mahony

The pandemic caused significant disruption to healthcare organizations worldwide, and many are still feeling that disruption. New delivery models, new technologies, and patient backlogs are leading to cost pressures and administrative headaches. Digital electronic health record software like EHR has been a lifesaver for streamlining admin—but there’s always trouble in paradise.

A treatment plan for healthcare IT overspending

For all the many advantages that it offers, standard on-premises EHR implementations are often a real drain on resources. EHR requirements place heavy demands on personnel and IT infrastructure. Organizations have to do the legwork of purchasing and licensing the latest hardware and software, as well as configuring and maintaining them.

Moving EHR partially or wholly to the cloud offers a major opportunity to lighten this burden by cutting operational costs, lowering the administrative burden on IT staff, and making It easier to stay within EHR guidelines.

Taking an EHR journey to the cloud

It’s common knowledge that healthcare providers faced enormous clinical pressure during the pandemic, but behind-the-scenes financial pressure is less well known.

Digitization of healthcare systems with solutions like EHR system meets evolving needs and is an excellent source of efficiency savings for many organizations. However, keeping up with rolling storage and compute requirements can often create a new drag on IT departments—and budgets.

Refresh cycles for on-premises EHR infrastructure can cost millions of dollars and cause hefty downtime, so healthcare providers need a way to implement changes faster to minimize costs and disruption. With EHR's lower price point and improved flexibility, moving infrastructure to the cloud is the ideal way to realize these savings.

Smoother, faster, smarter

Reducing health IT costs is a major advantage for cloud-based EHR because it doesn’t require upfront capital investments in new hardware or in-house storage, and It reduces the ongoing cost of maintaining an on-premises infrastructure.

Moving your EHR software deployment to the cloud lets you right-size your storage in minutes, cuts operational costs, and frees up IT resources to be deployed on other projects. Compared with on-premises EHR, new installations, system maintenance, data migration, and software updates are cheaper when software engineers can carry out these tasks remotely without needing to deploy IT teams on site.

How NetApp can help

EHR on Amazon Web Services using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP offers an unmatched cloud solution for EHR users. With enterprise-grade performance and management capabilities that have traditionally been limited to the data center, you can access the same NetApp® ONTAP® experience you would have on premises or in the cloud—something you won’t find anywhere else.

Enable application and storage administrators to launch, run, and scale fully managed ONTAP file and block storage on AWS with just a few clicks. Access fully featured storage efficiency capabilities tailored to reduce costs, including thin provisioning, deduplication, compression, and compaction, as well as policy-based automated storage tiering.

This wealth of new capabilities enables healthcare organizations to focus on what matters most: improving the quality of care they offer and the outcomes for patients. By breaking down data silos and combining different sources, you can gain insights and guide better business decisions. As a result, you'll also benefit in other areas like transforming clinical operations and customizing and enhancing patient, clinician, and employee experiences.

Ready for EHR with the advantages of cloud?

Brian O'Mahony

Brian is a global business development manager for Electronic Health Records (EHR) at NetApp. He has over 20 years’ experience in healthcare. At NetApp he manages several EHR vendors and provides industry though leadership and education to NetApp’s healthcare business. Over the years, he has served in several different roles designing, selling, and implementing EHR solutions. He has helped transform countless healthcare organizations on how to unlock data to help improve patient care.

View all Posts by Brian O'Mahony

Next Steps

Drift chat loading