CHOC Drives Pediatric Healthcare Innovation with Savings Achieved on AWS

Healthcare organizations such as Children’s Health Orange County (CHOC) are looking for ways to operate more efficiently, and cloud technology can help. CHOC is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create time and operational savings that can be put toward healthcare innovation.

Since 2019, pediatric health network CHOC has been in the process of migrating some of its most significant information technology infrastructure to AWS. Now, half of CHOC’s virtual desktop environment runs on VMware Cloud on AWS, a service that enables customers to consolidate their on-premises data centers, extend their data center capacity with cloud resources, and enhance their disaster recovery capabilities. The other half of CHOC’s architecture runs onsite. In addition, CHOC fully migrated its backups and business continuity program to AWS. The healthcare organization is also in the process of making its disaster recovery program more robust and centralized by using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (CloudEndure Disaster Recovery), which minimizes downtime and data loss by providing fast, reliable recovery of physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers on AWS. “We’re very well positioned in the future to expand out and deliver a very robust disaster recovery environment,” says Adam Gold, chief technology officer of CHOC.

Using AWS for Health tools, which include an extensive portfolio of healthcare and life sciences solutions, has enabled CHOC to save significant time and money. With CHOC’s virtual desktop environment on AWS, providers can move while they work. “Being able to provide our caregivers with the ability to roam and maintain their sessions has really added a lot of value to their workday and given them a lot of time back,” says Gold. The virtual environment, which has 200 clinical sessions running on AWS, has high availability and the scalability to accommodate growing demand. It has also reduced login time from 60 to 15 seconds, saving a total of 55 hours of time per week. 

Migrating its backup and business continuity system to AWS provides CHOC more ease of use and flexibility, higher availability, and reduced operational costs—especially because CHOC can now discontinue its tape and local archive storage. Using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (CloudEndure Disaster Recovery), CHOC can run backups on 300 virtual machines approximately every 10 minutes. Using the service saves CHOC time and money by enabling restore times of less than 10 minutes—rather than the previous restore times of 2–3 hours—and by making it possible for CHOC to discontinue using its offsite data center. 

The time and cost savings CHOC has experienced through AWS services enable the organization to look to future innovations like robotic automation, chatbots, and Amazon Alexa at the bedside. “Using AWS for Health has enabled us to provide the highest quality and most advanced care in a safe environment for our kiddos and create an experience that delights our providers and associates,” says Gold.

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