Accelerating code modernization using AWS Transform with Netsmart

Netsmart built some of its solutions, including myUnity, an EHR for post-acute care; myAvatar, an EHR for behavioral health; and OrderConnect, an e-prescribing and medication management solution, on web application frameworks such as Angular. Keeping those frameworks current is essential. Outdated versions eventually lose long-term support, stop receiving security patches, and introduce risk for the clinicians that rely on the software daily.

However, each upgrade cycle required months of planning and manual regression testing to validate that changes hadn’t broken the UI or functionality. Every minute spent on maintenance was a minute not spent building capabilities that healthcare providers were asking for. This challenge is common for organizations that manage many code bases at scale. Netsmart was looking for a way to modernize at speed while maintaining quality and keeping senior engineers focused on impactful work.

A longtime AWS strategic customer, Netsmart gained early visibility into emerging AWS capabilities. To help address its modernization challenges, the company identified AWS Transform, an agentic AI service that was developed to accelerate enterprise modernization, as a perfect fit.

By adopting purpose-built AWS tools to simplify migration and modernization, the company turned a persistent infrastructure challenge into a catalyst for improving the speed and resilience of application delivery. Netsmart built its modernization tool kit to stay up to date with Angular versions around AWS Transform, making the service the foundation of the company’s upgrade strategy. This way, Netsmart established a structured methodology for planning and conducting code transformations.

To aid in automated validation workflows, the company paired AWS Transform with Kiro, an agentic coding service. Using the two services together, Netsmart was able to confirm that each upgrade preserved functionality and UI consistency. Netsmart also adopted Amazon Q Developer, a generative AI–powered assistant for software development, to round out its agentic toolset. Integrated with GitHub, the service handles automated code review, giving teams a consistent check on quality as changes move through the pipeline.

“The question was always, ‘How do we get to our target version of Angular, and what does the plan look like?’” says Ryan Behan, senior vice president of engineering and principal architect at Netsmart. “AWS Transform helped to simplify the process by automatically detecting the breaking changes and applying broad modifications across large, complex code bases. That story repeats from team to team, which is exactly why you want a repeatable system like AWS Transform.”

Five engineering teams applied the methodology to distinct product lines and frameworks, from single-version Angular upgrades to multiversion migrations that involved hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Each team refined its strategies as complexity increased, creating a playbook that made subsequent projects faster to launch and complete.

The results validated the Netsmart investment in agentic AI. “Technology organizations need to invest in maintenance to preserve performance and security, but that work often competes with innovation,” says Behan. “Using AWS Transform, five teams, each with a single engineer, completed in 2 weeks projects that had been estimated at 3 months to over 1 year. They also delivered an 18-month migration in 5 months.” Across the program, Netsmart saw roughly a 90 percent reduction in effort for standard Angular upgrades and an 85 percent reduction for more complex migrations.

Netsmart used AWS Transform to scope and process code bases of significant scale: 1,518,151 lines of source code for myUnity (18.53 percent modified), 378,578 lines for myAvatar (9.87 percent modified), and 245,154 lines for OrderConnect (3.65 percent modified). In one effort, the company modernized more than 100,000 lines of legacy AngularJS to Angular 21—a migration that had previously stalled in repeating cycles.

The reclaimed engineering capacity now flows toward feature development and innovation rather than manual upgrade cycles. The company has since begun extending the methodology to .NET Core migrations. Exploring the use of additional AWS services for automated UI validation, Netsmart is taking steps toward embedding continuous modernization into its standard development lifecycle.