Why Hyland Healthcare customers transitioned to the cloud

Baptist Health

The Louisville, Kentucky-based health system has nine hospitals, nearly 23,000 employees and 1,500 providers. Facing pressure to innovate and provide the best possible experience for its patients, Baptist Health shifted from an on-prem deployment to the Hyland Cloud.

The Hyland Cloud is a secure platform that offers disaster recovery and ensures that an organization’s data will be available whenever and wherever it’s needed.

“We are more secure in in the cloud than we were on-premises. It’s just comforting and you sleep better at night,” Baptist Health Corporate IT Manager Mitzie Dodge said.

The full-spectrum health system deploys Hyland’s OnBase in the cloud across the enterprise — from accounts payable and human resources to clinical care, legal and radiology. Baptist Health has also deployed Hyland integrations for Epic and Workday, plus Hyland RPA (a comprehensive robotic automation software suite) and WorkView (Hyland’s low-code application development tool).

Bon Secours Mercy Health

Bon Secours is one of the five largest Catholic health systems in the U.S. and the largest not-for-profit private provider in Ireland. With 1,200 sites of care, including 49 hospitals, the health system felt “a lot of pressure to keep up with innovation,” IT Strategic Partner Julie Januski said.

Bon Secours also needed a streamlined way for its nurses and clinicians to access all the information they need. The solution: Shifting from an on-prem deployment to the Hyland Cloud, which provides an average uptime of 99.99%.

Like Baptist Health, Bon Secours utilizes Hyland’s OnBase across the enterprise. As part of its complex cloud deployment, Bon Secours consolidated two Epic and two OnBase instances into one of each. Bon Secours also leveraged OnBase to support staff using Workday, Sunquest, CoPath, 3M and more than 30 ancillary systems.

“Hyland has helped us resolve some of the challenges we’ve had by helping combine various systems into one so providers are more satisfied and clinicians are able to get to data right away,” Januski said.

Endeavor Health

Endeavor Health — formerly NorthShore – Edward-Elmhurst Health — created a combined entity that produced the third-largest health system in Illinois. The rebranding of the nine-hospital health system with more than 27,000 team members and 1.3 million patients brought with it outdated legacy systems.

One acquired entity had all of its employee records on paper.

The cost of maintaining the status quo — from system support workers and administrators to a significant hardware footprint — was high.

“You have to assign costs to all of those things,” said Endeavor Health System AVP Eric Merchant. “(Given) our five-year TCO (total cost of ownership), it made sense for us to go to the cloud.”

Endeavor Health moved 30 terabytes of data, encompassing 4 million patients and 800-plus projects, to the Hyland Cloud.

Top 10 benefits of moving to the cloud

Stability

Bon Secours moved 560 million documents to the cloud in its first migration. It later moved another 170 million.

“Prior to the move to the cloud, our system was a little unstable. Our on-prem instance was large,” Januski said.

Now, Bon Secours is “in a much more stable place than we were prior,” she added.

Security and disaster recovery

Dodge, Baptist Health’s corporate IT manager, used to lose sleep about not having a disaster recovery system in place. The Hyland Cloud provides that.

“We’re more secure in the cloud than we would be on-prem,” Dodge said.

Endeavor Health, Merchant said, “is attacked 1,500 times every hour. Thank God that nobody has penetrated our systems. The side benefit of the cloud with (Hyland and) AWS is that they are constantly optimizing security on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, and we are getting the benefit.”

Seamless integration

Bon Secours has more than 95,000 OnBase users. Easy, immediate access to information is critical.

“It’s very important at our organization that Hyland can integrate with other systems so that our clinicians can log in, have access to all the data at one point and not have to log into a bunch of different other applications,” Januski said. “Integration is key to the happiness of our clinicians and other providers.”

Time savings

Baptist Health now processes faxes 53% faster. Click batch scanning from home improved 49%, and processing times for six-page scans are 23% lower.

The health system’s cloud bundle includes two bots, which can run automated processes across the enterprise.

“We’ve done a lot of things with the bots, and we’ve saved time,” Dodge said.

At Bon Secours, “the cloud has freed time for admins to focus on more complex enhancements and projects,” Januski said.

Cost savings

Endeavor Health’s five-year TCO showed that the additional costs of staying on-premises more than justified the move to the cloud. Baptist Health, meanwhile, now monitors its system for about 10 minutes a day – a steep drop from its pre-cloud average of four hours. That adds up to a $30,000 annual savings, Dodge said.

The “CIO ROI”

Then there’s what Bon Secours CIO Mike Hibbard refers to as the “CIO ROI.”

“I could sleep better at night knowing that Hyland has our back on security, on patches, on monitoring,” he said.

Strategic shift

Baptist Health employees initially were concerned that the move to the cloud would negatively impact their jobs. Instead, they were thrilled to be able to focus on more meaningful work.

“What we found is it really has freed them up to work on strategic projects that we have that we couldn’t get to before because we were doing a lot of admin work,” Dodge said. “We were building servers, we were putting software on there, we were doing a lot of things that we don’t have to do now that the cloud takes care of.”

Decreased burden on staff

Now, Baptist Health’s IT department only needs to worry about testing the system.

“We don’t have to do everything else. And even the team’s kind of like, this is too easy,” Dodge said.

Fewer issues

“The move to the cloud has positively impacted our organization by not only providing stability, but the constant monitoring has decreased the number of tickets we are getting from users,” Januski said.

New products

The Epic and Workday integrations, combined with Hyland RPA and WorkView, have added quite a few tools to Baptist Health’s tech stack. The time-saving bots are also “a lot of fun” to use, Dodge said.

Best practices for cloud transitions

Plan, plan, plan

Endeavor Health’s Merchant has practical advice for healthcare organizations that are moving to the cloud: Do it right the first time.

“The more time you spend on planning and testing the product, the less time you spend handling issues,” he said.

Test, test, test

Endeavor Health delayed its go-live date three times to correct processes and test new ones.

“Well worth it,” Merchant said.

Set up executive sessions right away

Cloud providers will want to meet with top executives, who have jam-packed calendars, about the transition. Finding times that work for all parties can be challenging, so start scheduling sessions right away.

“That’ll save you a lot of headaches,” Dodge said.

Communication is crucial

Leadership, IT staff, relationship managers and other personnel need to be aware of the potential downtimes associated with a cloud move.

“Communication early on is key to that successful go-live,” Januski said.

Baptist Health set up a SharePoint page for end users that had FAQs, a go-live countdown and other useful resources.

Prepare for the unexpected

Unforeseen issues will come up, Dodge stressed.

Bon Secours paused the start date in two of its markets to “retool and rethink,” Januski said.

Find a “cloud buddy”

Dodge advises organizations to solicit advice and best practices from people who have been through cloud transitions. They can be a valuable guide, she said.