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Large US Hospital

Cloud Case Study

A nationally recognized hospital expands its cloud footprint to accelerate innovation and generate dramatic savings

See how Deloitte helped a large hospital in the US to improve patient care, streamline operations, and improve employee experience by migrating to the cloud.

Maintaining legacy technology can become a distraction for any organization—diverting time, money, and other resources away from the central mission. In the health care realm, that reality can be an especially stark one. Each dollar spent on unnecessary activities represents a dollar that could be used to support the primary mission: caring for patients.

For a large, nationally recognized academic hospital in the US, simplifying IT emerged as a strategic priority as the organization continually looked for ways to improve patient care—through greater stewardship of patient and other essential data, more efficient operations, and an improved experience for employees.

For years the hospital relied on a mainframe platform for its data and applications. But as annual maintenance costs approached the $1 million mark—and as skilled mainframe personnel became scarcer due to retirement and a skills shortage in the market—the organization decided to take a step back and ask one simple question: How can we do things more efficiently and in a way that positions us for the future?

What happened next

With cloud fully deployed, the organization can now focus its resources on projects that will benefit the community without relying on costly mainframe infrastructure or increasingly hard-to-find mainframe specialists.

While adhering to retention policies and creating a future state for each asset in the cloud, Deloitte and the organization developed a detailed road map for retiring each mainframe asset. The result after migration? Data that can be made rapidly available for regulatory and reporting needs, as well as used with any cloud apps that might require the data. Another major impact of the cloud move: dramatic savings—with overall costs reduced by nearly 95%.

Legacy HR apps and data have been a significant element of the project, as they continue to be essential day to day. As part of the mainframe-to-cloud migration, the hospital made historical mainframe data available via a cloud app, through Tableau reports and an SQL server on Azure. Deloitte undertook a number of key activities to help the hospital save time and achieve the required outcomes.

Leveraging its industry-specific knowledge and cloud transformation experience, Deloitte was able to guide the migration of mainframe data and archives to the cloud, creating the Tableau reports to replicate inquiry-only screens from mainframe applications, and deploying robotic process automation (RPA) to download documents that had to be retained in their native format. With cloud fully deployed, the organization can now focus its resources on projects that will benefit the community without relying on costly mainframe infrastructure or increasingly hard-to-find mainframe specialists.

The Wins

1. Lower total cost of IT ownership

2. Reduced staffing pressures and dependency on mainframe specialists, with many nearing retirement

3. Ability to focus more resources on activities that can improve patient outcomes and service

4. Greater data accessibility, reliability, and security for reporting and regulatory compliance needs

5. An expanded cloud footprint to support future innovation and flexibility—as part of a cloud journey

 

By the numbers

$1 M
typical annual mainframe costs for the organization saved

95%
projected cost savings in moving from mainframe to cloud

54
mainframe applications successfully migrated to cloud

53
mainframe databases successfully migrated to cloud

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