Rackspace Healthcare Solutions

In most organizations, transformation is successful when objectives are reached according to budget, timeframes and established quality standards.  The multi-year digital transformation programs underway in many healthcare organizations are no different, and any variability in IT costs can hinder progress. For most healthcare organizations, the transition to a cloud-based service model for EHR administration mitigates the unpredictability of on-premises EHR platform costs and helps to keep transformation programs on track.

As budgets tighten, healthcare institutions are driven to deliver the same levels of service to patients. This, of course, propagates into IT as well. Systems must continue to be patched and maintained. Upgrades still need to be made and licenses must be paid. Hence, greater efficiencies often need to be found elsewhere. By embracing Epic-as-a-service from Rackspace Technology, you can get dedicated support from a team whose mission is to assist you in achieving the best patient outcomes and free up scarce resources to work on other priorities.

The pace of technology change is driving organizations to review their data center strategy. The best example of this is the huge wave of interest in generative AI. The opportunity for healthcare organizations to leverage generative AI is massive, but the stringent regulations and overwhelming need for patient privacy means that they will look to implement it within a dedicated infrastructure.

However, generative AI is a heavy consumer of power – far more than is typically provisioned in a traditional on-premises data center. At the same time, pressures are mounting to improve sustainability and reduce energy consumption. Healthcare organizations need to closely examine their data center strategies and explore the options available to them to adopt new generative AI-enabled applications while improving sustainability.

Find out more about how Rackspace can help you transform your data center →

Alongside a need to upgrade basic data center infrastructure, healthcare organizations also need to refresh the technologies contained within them. Steady improvements in price-to-performance ratios are increasing hardware refresh rates, which, in turn, is driving demand for increased capital investment at a time when most organizations are trying to reduce costs.  Simultaneously, opportunities for increased levels of observability and automation are being missed due to a skills shortage.

As the pace of change is accelerating, managers are demanding shorter application development times, yet application lifecycles are becoming shorter. Essentially, everything needs to happen faster — for less cost.

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Healthcare organizations aren’t immune to the pressure to innovate quickly. In the field of life sciences, innovation has historically been constrained by tight regulations. Ten-year development cycles to get a new drug to market have been commonplace. However, pressure created by the recent pandemic to create new vaccines quickly facilitated the breakdown of traditional development processes while introducing the utilization of new technologies, including AI. This development has opened the door to using these technologies in other areas of healthcare as a way to accelerate the rate at which services are developed and delivered.

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Healthcare is the one industry in which the ability to generate outcomes can be — literally — a matter of life or death.  With patient care plans architected completely based on the data within their medical record, downtime cannot be tolerated. Historically, most providers have staffed their IT teams within their data centers and have spent considerable sums putting in place a comprehensive business continuity plan that accounts for staff that’s ready to jump into action when something fails. However, the pressure to reduce costs is impacting those plans, and new cloud-based solutions are seen as the solution.

Find out how you can maximize your uptime with a disaster recovery service here.

The maintenance of patient privacy is highly regulated and core to the entire healthcare industry. Naturally, healthcare organizations are highly attractive targets for ransomware attacks. Ransomware attacks have almost doubled over the past couple of years, with the median payout approaching $2.5M, plus costs of over $2M incurred throughout event remediation. the implementation of robust data protection is the best way to mediate against a ransomware attack. The creation of immutable snapshots can prevent ransomware from encrypting backup data.

Find out more about protecting your organization from ransomware here.