Cloudticity Helps Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services Use AWS to Become an Innovator in Patient-Centered Healthcare

Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) is a statewide, nonprofit health information exchange (HIE) that provides critical and comprehensive patient information to doctors, clinics, health centers, hospitals, pharmacies, health insurance providers, and public health agencies. By securely connecting patients with healthcare services, the organization helps deliver the best care for millions of Michigan residents.

Every week, MiHIN manages millions of patient messages for hospital admissions, discharges, or transfers. The MiHIN platform routes information for more than 13 million patients, and participating hospitals send notifications for about 99 percent of all admissions in the state. MiHIN's on-premises data center was struggling to keep pace with increasing message volumes, and frequent outages—occurring nearly every two months—created significant disruptions to critical patient data access. Additionally, maintaining Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance within the on-premises environment proved challenging. The need for a more scalable and reliable platform was urgent. 

Furthermore, MiHIN sought to accelerate innovation and expedite new initiatives. “We needed to be more agile as an organization. When we decided to pursue an initiative in the public or private sector, we would spend four months procuring hardware, and then we’d have to hire teams of engineers,” says Richard Fish, chief information officer at MiHIN. “By the time we completed these tasks, we were left with only nine months to build and operationalize the initiative. We thought there had to be a better, faster way of doing things, so we decided to look at the cloud.”

MiHIN solved its challenges by working with Cloudticity, a member of the AWS Global Security & Compliance Acceleration Program (GSCA). The GSCA program assists AWS customers in meeting their authorization requirements by providing guidance around security frameworks, walkthroughs of AWS compliance tools and controls, and referrals to qualified security partners as needed. “Cloudticity had collaborated with us on previous projects, and we trusted them to help us move to the cloud,” Fish says. “Cloudticity stood out as a true partner in this transformation. Beyond typical vendor support, they invested in our team's success by providing in-depth training on technology selection and implementation. This hands-on approach empowered our employees to manage the environment independently.”

Working with Cloudticity, MiHIN began migrating its key workloads to AWS. Cloudticity helped MiHIN use secure cloud-native API tools to ensure stronger VPN connections. Cloudticity then moved servers to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes for Amazon EC2 storage, while using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for a database solution. Cloudticity also implemented Cloudticity Oxygen, a cloud management solution that provides continuous visibility into meeting HIPAA regulations and automates compliance controls. “With Cloudticity Oxygen and AWS, we knew we were building security and compliance into every step of the migration and deployment,” says Fish.

Following the initial migration, Cloudticity helped MiHIN achieve its goal of becoming a cloud-native organization by using services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). “Our approach is to use serverless technologies like AWS Lambda first, and containerized applications using Amazon ECS second,” says Michael Sherman, cloud architect at MiHIN. Cloudticity also helped MiHIN ensure scalability and high availability by using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) and AWS Auto Scaling.

As the next step in its cloud journey, MiHIN worked with Cloudticity to implement graph databases powered by Amazon Neptune. By taking advantage of Amazon Neptune, MiHIN modernized its Active Care Relationship Service (ACRS) solution, which organizations use to send data files that record the relationships between health professionals and patients. “Amazon Neptune graph database technology will give us deeper data insights and lay the foundation for AI integration,” says Fish.

The migration to AWS and implementation of Cloudticity Oxygen have significantly enhanced MiHIN's capabilities. The platform now seamlessly handles the exchange of information for more than 13 million patients, processes approximately 99 percent of all Michigan hospital admissions, and ingests information from a staggering 17 million data points weekly. This robust infrastructure has also eliminated the recurring service disruptions that plagued the previous on-premises environment. As a result, MiHIN now guarantees uninterrupted access to critical patient data for both patients and healthcare providers. “Instead of an outage every 60 days, we’ve had zero measurable downtime since converting our legacy server-based applications to AWS Cloud technology,” says Fish. “This ultimately helps us provide better service to patients and hospitals across the state.”

Relying on Cloudticity Oxygen and AWS, MiHIN has streamlined HIPAA compliance and can more confidently demonstrate that compliance to customers. “We’re able to go above and beyond simply meeting HIPAA regulations. We have access to compliance reports in Cloudticity Oxygen, and the platform’s monitoring helps us deliver a better experience by placing our cloud and engineering teams closer to our customers because they don’t have to focus on infrastructure management.”

The AWS and Cloudticity environment also gives MiHIN more agility, which has led to a business model transformation. “It used to take us nearly a year from idea to setting up a new platform, but now we can do the setup in three weeks and be in production in 90 days,” says Fish. As a result, MiHIN is evolving from a traditional HIE into a healthcare innovator investing in organizations such as the Interoperability Institute, a nonprofit focused on accelerating national interoperability. Additionally, the MiHIN graph database on Amazon Neptune positions MiHIN and its customers to take advantage of AI for data insights. “Using Amazon Neptune, we’ve started to offer strength scoring—matching a specific attribute to a patient and putting a score on the patient-provider relationship to gain confidence in the validity of the relationship,” says Fish. “Overall, making healthcare better is one of our core competencies, and we’re able to support that with Cloudticity and AWS.”