Problem
After 5 acquisitions, a leading healthcare specialty clinic, started to experience operational friction due to managing multiple redundant cloud systems, lacking central identity management, and open source software not running latest releases. Employees were forced to login through multiple dialogues in order to accomplish certain tasks or processes such as accessing staff profile records and updating equipment inventory logs. Invoices for cloud services were reflecting, duplicate use of authentication, providers and cloud work loads. The cloud landscape across all the acquired companies consisted of AWS, Azure, and Oracle. Furthermore, finding documentation, images, resources, and teammate, and patient information was taking precious hours at a time, because there was no federated search tool for finding information across the consolidated organization.
Not only did the clinic desire to create efficiency across its cloud landscape, it needed to plan for further growth in expanding markets. A data strategy and needed to be developed so the clinic could analyze historic and real-time data. The strategy would define the components of a new data pipeline that the clinic would use for just-in-time strategic business decisions.
Solution
A decision needed to be made that would streamline operations and help put IT spend back to the clinic’s bottom line. Because of its simple geographic pricing model, inherent zero-trust security model, unique database services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) emerged as the ideal cloud platform to migrate AWS and Azure cloud services to.
Most of the acquired clinics’ teams used O365 productivity tools, resulting in Microsoft Active Directory being selected as the identity provider for staff members and patients. OCI’s out-of-the-box support for Microsoft AD helped accelerate the project’s timeline and offer users a seamless, familiar log-in experience.
To help clinic staff quickly find resources across the enterprise, OCI Search with OpenSearch (Apache 2.0 open source license), was configured to run on OCI cloud and on-prem networks. OpenSearch’s customizable features gives the clinic the ability to search vast amounts of data across disparate sources including various clinic websites, patient accounts, and treatment databases. As new data sources are brought into the clinic enterprise, they can quickly be added to OpenSearch’s index.
In addition to an efficient enterprise search feature, the clinic needed a way to expeditiously collect new patient, treatment, and industry data as well as run analysis on historic data. SQL Server data and NoSQL data was migrated to OCI’s MySQL Enterprise to take advantage of MySQL Heatwave’s unparalleled query performance speed. HIPAA and PII compliance was achieved through MySQL Enterprise’s masking and de-identification feature.
Dataflow, OCI’s fully managed Apache Spark service, was integrated with MySQL to process and analyze daily appointments, scheduling, procedure and treatment plans with the goal of improving procedure outcomes and identifying where cost overruns can be reduced. Because Spark works with multiple different programming languages for visualization (Python, R, Scala, Java), the clinic can customize data analysis from week to week without needing to train their data staff on another programming language. Dataflow also allows the data staff to focus on analysis versus sinking time into maintaining their Spark infrastructure.
OCI’s breadth of cloud offerings and its competitive pricing was the lynchpin in the clinic’s cloud provider decision. Moreover, OCI’s DevOps service was employed to automate scanning the clinic’s custom application build artifacts for open source software package vulnerabilities, outdated releases, and dependency conflicts. The DevOps service’s Notifications feature alerts the clinic’s development team immediately when a scan finds an issue with a build artifact, allowing their team to include vulnerability mitigation and package upgrades as part of every agile sprint. This automated step helps the development team keep application technical debt levels as low as possible.
Impact
- Over 6 months, the clinic saw a 35% cost reduction in cloud services invoices on OCI. Cloud service price consistency across all geographies has made quarterly IT budgeting tasks straightforward.
- Consolidated invoicing has increased the Accounts Payable team’s efficiency for closing month’s-end books by 20%.
- Enterprise federated login and traceability have dramatically reduced preparation time for new hire on-boarding and training 37% while hardening the clinic’s security posture.
- Finding a document or patient that exists in another clinic practice takes seconds compared to hours of times needed for searching certain resources before the OpenSearch implementation.
- Custom application deployment prep and execution time has been reduced by 46%.
- OCI’s SLA terms and commitment to availability, manageability, and performance have resulted in no network failures or latency issues across any cloud services. Should any failures or issues occur, claims for service credits can be made at the My Oracle Support portal.
Next Step
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