Change Healthcare Migrates to Cloud in 60 Days and Drives Innovation with AWS

Change Healthcare is an independent, $3.5 billion healthcare technology company that connects payers, providers, and patients across the United States. Its focus is to build a better healthcare system via innovative financial, clinical, and engagement solutions that help improve the consumer experience, patient outcomes, and operational efficiency.

When Change Healthcare merged with McKesson Technology Solutions, it needed to migrate business-critical applications from legacy McKesson data centers to a new environment. However, Change Healthcare’s internal DevOps teams knew that scaling in the available timeline would be challenging, so it sought a technology partner to augment the skills gap. “Merging two leading IT companies into one strained our internal resources,” says Zigmond Kuczynski, vice president of infrastructure and cloud operations at Change Healthcare. “We needed an outside resource with transformative capabilities to help lead the migration.”

In addition, Change Healthcare needed to quickly migrate its ClaimsXten claims processing application to the cloud to accommodate a large customer, and it sought to move an internal demo and training application environment to the cloud to enable self-service and agility for developers. The company also needed to ensure it could maintain regulatory compliance during the migration. “We must comply with all required security policies and controls across all our workloads,” says Kuczynski.

A longtime Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer, Change Healthcare addressed its challenges by engaging AWS Customer Enablement services including AWS Managed Services (AMS) and AWS Professional Services. “We reached out to AMS because we’ve talked about the concept of managed services for a long time,” says Kuczynski. “In addition to our governance and security requirements, we had challenges related to legacy operating systems and limited cloud migration. The AMS team stepped in and helped us figure these things out.”

AMS and AWS Professional Services provided Change Healthcare with comprehensive expertise and resources, tools, and processes to migrate workloads to the AWS Cloud while still maintaining security and compliance. AWS Professional Services helped with configuration assistance during the migration, and AMS began operating and managing the company’s workloads in the cloud following the migration.

With AWS Professional Services, Change Healthcare re-platformed portions of ClaimsXten into a HIPAA- and HITRUST-compliant AWS Landing Zone. AMS provides an operating model to assist with cost optimization and infrastructure management. “This was a very collaborative relationship, where we knew what we wanted to accomplish with this migration and we pulled in AMS and then eventually AWS Professional Services,” says Kuczynski. “Both teams brought along the right people. Eventually, though, it comes down to execution, and AMS and AWS Professional Services excel at bringing in teams with the right expertise and knowledge.” Additionally, Change Healthcare receives regular technical assistance from AWS Support.

Change Healthcare now runs its application environments on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for customer data. Based on the success of the migration, Change Healthcare is moving more than 1,800 servers, including some of the company’s largest applications, out of the data center and onto AWS, with AMS managing the environments.

Change Healthcare was able to move two key business applications and 12 environments into the AWS Landing Zone in two months, which was faster than expected. “We went from concept to deployment in 60 days because of the expertise of AWS Managed Services and AWS Professional Services,” says Kuczynski. “AWS Customer Enablement services helped us meet the aggressive timelines around our split and reforming, while also helping us address concerns about compliance and security. It was amazing what we accomplished in a short period of time.”

As a result of migrating quickly, Change Healthcare avoided significant investment in new hardware and met accelerated deployment deadlines to earn additional business with its customers.

Relying on AMS and its compliance-enabling environment built on the AWS Landing Zone using AWS Systems Manager, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail, Change Healthcare helps ensure its workloads comply with HIPAA, FedRAMP, and other key healthcare industry regulations. “Compliance is everything for our organization, and AWS is helping us ensure it’s maintained,” Kuczynski says. “This means making sure that our security policies are adhered to 100 percent of the time, deploying only services that have been reviewed and approved and meet all regulatory requirements.”

Change Healthcare is focusing on new software innovation as it relies on AWS Customer Enablement to drive overall operations management. “AWS Managed Services and AWS Professional Services help our leadership and DevOps teams effectively deploy their services and, as a result, we’re seeing more successful software releases,” says Kuczynski. “In addition, AWS Enterprise Support provides our application teams and business owners with regular reports and metrics. With AWS Customer Enablement, we can pivot our operational dollars, so our developers and engineers can focus on what they do really well: write code, push functionality, and drive innovation. This ultimately supports our long-term strategy around delivering modern solutions to our customers.”

Change Healthcare plans to continue working with AWS Customer Enablement services on additional enterprise initiatives. “We are moving from being a data center–focused company to one that fully embraces the public cloud,” says Kuczynski. “AMS, AWS Professional Services, and AWS Enterprise Support are helping us drive that change. Their teams are collaborating with us to better understand where we’re trying to go and the best way to get there.”

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/customer-enablement.