Baptist Memorial Health Care Boosts Resilience and Performance by Migrating EHR to AWS

BMHC is one of the largest private health systems in the United States, providing scheduled and urgent healthcare services to 3 million patients across Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Central to its growing operations is an Epic electronic health records (EHR) system, which stores and manages sensitive patient data that must be available to healthcare providers in real time, 24 hours a day. This regulated workload was housed in an on-premises data center located in Memphis, Tennessee—a location vulnerable to weather events and a nearby fault line that could cause system outages.

To protect against these threats while supporting the organization’s growth, BMHC needed more resilient disaster recovery (DR) that could ensure business continuity, improve security, and scale as needed. While exploring options, BMHC considered building a mirrored physical data center in an alternate location. However, that option would have come with hefty capital expenditures, lengthy deployment times, and the need for regular hardware refreshes. Realizing that this approach would not meet the urgent need for a more resilient DR solution, BMHC turned to the cloud.

To find the right solution for its digital operations, BMHC partnered with AWS Partner Optimum Healthcare IT, a trusted collaborator with proven expertise in cloud migrations and Epic implementations. Together, they selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its robust capabilities and the continuous innovation that improves price performance for customers. AWS offered a compelling DR strategy with its ability to scale resources, provide high availability across multiple regions, and ensure compliance with stringent healthcare regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). “AWS is so far ahead of other vendors in these abilities that there wasn’t even a comparison,” says Tom Barnett, BMHC’s chief digital and information officer.

Optimum Healthcare IT and BMHC leveraged the Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS for Healthcare, which provides a foundational set of capabilities that align with AWS best practices and multiple healthcare-related compliance frameworks, including HIPAA and the National Cyber Security Centre guidance. This enabled the team to quickly stand up a pilot program as a proof of concept. “The Landing Zone Accelerator simplified efforts to deploy a secure and compliant environment quickly, allowing us to focus on delivering real value to our business,” says Curtis Hendrick, senior vice president of cloud and digital transformation at Optimum Healthcare IT.

The solution uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for scalable and reliable compute infrastructure and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for the most durable storage in the cloud and industry-leading availability. Based on its unique architecture, Amazon S3 provides 99.999999999% (11 nines) data durability and 99.99% availability, and it’s backed by the strongest service level agreements in the cloud. The elasticity of AWS enables BMHC to automatically scale resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance during peak usage hours while reducing costs during off-peak times.

The pilot demonstrated the AWS capabilities in handling BMHC’s Epic system under load conditions with comprehensive security. Technical teams were impressed by the performance and scalability of AWS and valued the extensive AWS native abilities within the tech stack, which provided a cleaner, more resilient architecture without the need for third-party software. The pilot program’s success led to a full-scale migration of BMHC’s Epic system to AWS.