Migrating Legacy Applications, Databases, and Health Records Data from On-Premise to the Cloud

The client is a mid-west based not-for-profit health system with nearly 40,000 employees and 11,000 providers. It includes 23 hospitals, 290+ physician offices, ten post-acute facilities, home care and hospice services, a pharmacy benefit company, a health insurance company, and an accountable care organization.

Key Challenges

The client had a legacy Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (SQL Server PDW) that included a Microsoft SQL Server database, third-party server hardware, and networking components. PDW had legacy application databases from Epic, SAP, and Press Ganey. Moving with the times, the client wanted to migrate all of this to the cloud. The key challenges involved in this were as follows:

• Manually rebuilding data from Epic Clarity (relational database of Epic)
• Expiring appliance warranty
• Migrating a host of procedures and functions, and
• Other critical dependencies

The client needed a single source of truth to bring together patient and financial information from disparate source systems and improve the quality of patient care.

Solution Approach

It was decided that shifting to a cloud computing environment and building a highly scalable end-to-end data warehouse solution on Microsoft Azure SQL Hyperscale was a good solution. 314e provided the client with the best approach for seamlessly ensuring data transformation to the Azure cloud cost-effectively. 314e’s consultants with rich healthcare domain experience were able to optimally configure Azure cloud infrastructure and properly scale environments. The project was executed to transform existing data marts and application-specific relational database silos into Azure cloud, which provided a scalable reporting/analytics platform for the enterprise.

Business Outcomes

The business outcomes that came into effect were as follows:

• Scalable Azure cloud environment for enterprise reporting and analytics, which would scale based on data requirement
• Highly available Azure SQL Hyperscale environment to meet dynamic business demands
• Access to patient information with high availability, security, and ease of access using a single analytics platform