Chris O’Brien Lifehouse Uses AWS to Maintain and Secure Electronic Health Records

Chris O’Brien Lifehouse opened to patients in November 2013. With 150 beds and 10 surgery theaters, it was originally the brainchild of Dr. Chris O’Brien, a head and neck cancer specialist who became a cancer patient himself. His vision was to provide integrated, patient-centered care for both public and private patients so that they could achieve the best possible health outcomes without having to navigate cancer alone.

To maintain its growing streams of data, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse uses MEDITECH for patient administration and electronic health records. MEDITECH requires intensive near real-time data manipulation, fast disk access, high availability, and the ability to scale up and down to serve patients and hospital needs effectively. As Chris O’Brien Lifehouse’s data needs grew, it needed a cloud-based solution to support MEDITECH and the rest of the hospital’s clinical systems. It also needed to be sure that migrating to the cloud was a smart long-term business decision.

“We evaluated a number of cloud providers over the course of a year before choosing AWS,” says Peter Singer, the director of information technology at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse. “Other providers said they could do it, but upon testing, they failed to provide the application responsiveness we needed. AWS was outstanding technologically and flexible enough for us to be able to build the high availability we needed.”

In 2019 the hospital completed an infrastructure lift-and-shift migration of its MEDITECH system to AWS. After its data was migrated to the cloud, the hospital upgraded to the Expanse version of MEDITECH. Building its own environment on AWS infrastructure was the optimal solution for facilitating operations, providing the hospital with the ability to perform workloads on demand and reduce costs using pay-as-you-go services.

Running MEDITECH Expanse on AWS is now at the core of Chris O’Brien Lifehouse’s operations—how it makes treatment plans, preserves data integrity, and understands and communicates with patients. The hospital uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) to maintain control over its virtual networking environment, including resource placement, connectivity, and data security. Using this service, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse can continue prioritizing its protection of patients’ private medical records while maintaining the data in Australia. The data is also encrypted in transit and at rest.

For compute, the hospital uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Physics technicians and doctors efficiently run oncology applications that require enormous compute power, such as graphical processing to determine the exact location for a patient’s radiation treatment. Patients benefit from the time saved on this compute-intensive work. “When an emergency patient comes in, a doctor can make complex calculations and prescribe radiation treatment in near real-time,” Singer says. “What used to take us five hours now takes less than one hour on AWS in most cases. That’s a real benefit.”

To manage and store data at any scale, the hospital uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Further, the hospital uses AWS Backup to centralize and automate data protection across its services and workloads. It used to need quarterly half-day outages to make major system updates each year, but now it can do ongoing maintenance without any major outages.

In choosing AWS, the hospital sought long-term, flexible, cost-effective data solutions so that its employees could focus on their business—serving cancer patients—rather than on technology. “There are always costs of migrating to the cloud,” Singer says, “but the key is to get the most out of it. We can sustainably get more out of our environment, and we can give patients more.” Furthermore, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse has found AWS to be reliable and responsive. “AWS support is always there when we need it,” Singer says. “When we reach out, we get a quick response. It’s been outstanding.”

Electronic medical records can take years to optimize, but many patients don’t have years to wait for technology to catch up with their health needs. Using AWS services, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse can make the most of today’s technology while planning ahead for future changes and needs. The hospital’s health experts can innovate without worrying about how they will manage the innovation technologically. “The AWS team saw the future and worked alongside us, so we can focus on patients,” Singer says. “The journey is worth it, because for the next 4–5 years we’re set. We can update as we go with flexible cloud infrastructure.”

Chris O’Brien Lifehouse is dedicated to improving patients’ quality of life and health outcomes. “Our mission is to put patients first, and patient outcomes are significantly better when the organization is dedicated to a focus on cancer,” Singer says. Using AWS services, the hospital staff can focus on patients instead of hardware and traditional IT services.

Going forward, Chris O’Brien Lifehouse plans to go over 99 percent paperless using AWS. And in the meantime, the hospital can give patients exactly what they need, when they need it. “Even when cancer isn’t curable, we can focus on extending life,” says Singer. “And we choose hope.”