York, Pa.-based WellSpan Health expects its quarterly Epic upgrades to become faster and less resource-intensive as a result of the health system’s newly completed migration to Amazon Web Services.
“Our future Epic upgrades, which we go through every quarter, will get more and more efficient with the use of better tooling and technology,” Wasif Jamal, senior vice president and CIO of WellSpan Health, in an interview with Becker’s.
WellSpan completed its migration to AWS in July, moving more than 300 clinical applications and 7.5 petabytes of clinical and non-clinical data, including its full Epic EHR environment, off on-premises data center infrastructure. The health system finished the migration in 17 weeks, a pace it has said outpaces industry norms for a project of its scale. Becker’s first reported the planned migration in January, when WellSpan named AWS as its preferred cloud provider.
How the migration came together
Mr. Jamal said the 17-week timeline was the product of WellSpan’s internal infrastructure, application and clinical teams working alongside AWS engineers, who also helped train WellSpan staff during the process.
“It was a combination of internal technical resources, application teams and our clinical team,” he said. “But we also had some excellent support from AWS in that regard.”
The scope of the move went beyond Epic’s core system. WellSpan also migrated its Epic ecosystem, the surrounding applications that connect to it, including the Mirth interface engine, imaging systems and other connected clinical tools.
“We not only moved the Epic core, we also moved an Epic ecosystem application,” Mr. Jamal said.
What it unlocks for Epic upgrades
Housing that entire ecosystem in the cloud, Mr. Jamal said, gives WellSpan more flexibility to scale Epic’s computing resources up or down as needed.
“My ability to scale Epic quickly in an on-prem ecosystem presents its own challenges: capital planning, capital purchases, deployment, configuration before I can plan,” he said. “Now I have the ability to scale Epic much more quickly.”
That flexibility extends to disaster recovery. Rather than maintaining backup capacity that sits largely idle, WellSpan can now test failover on a quarterly basis and rely on cloud infrastructure to build disaster recovery services “much more effectively than anybody can do on-prem.”
The bigger shift for Epic upgrades specifically, Mr. Jamal said, comes from automation. WellSpan plans to lean on infrastructure-as-code tools such as Ansible and Terraform to handle more of the change management work that quarterly Epic upgrades require.
“Cloud services offer much better automation,” he said. “We can use a lot of modern technologies now to automate a lot of the change management within Epic that gives us time back.”
Optimization and AI plans
WellSpan is now moving from migration into what Jamal called a FinOps-focused optimization phase, aimed at right-sizing its cloud resources and improving cost visibility.
That phase also includes early work on AI. Mr. Jamal pointed to Amazon Bedrock as a foundation for building what he described as an agentic, platform-agnostic AI layer that could interact across WellSpan’s underlying systems, including Oracle, ServiceNow and Epic, without clinicians or patients needing to navigate separate AI tools for each platform.
“As a patient interacting through a digital front door, or as a physician, APP or a nurse managing any clinical workflows, you don’t have to worry about the million different AIs that you and I are dealing with,” Mr. Jamal said. “Every platform has its own AI name, and I think with the Amazon Bedrock services that we’re going after, I can build that abstraction layer.”
Weighing the investment
While WellSpan didn’t share a specific cost figure for the migration, the health system stated its arrangement with AWS is structured around consumption targets that bundle infrastructure use with professional services. Mr. Jamal said he views the return on the investment as broader than a financial calculation alone.
“ROI for cloud adoption isn’t always financial numbers,” he said. “A lot of the legacy technologies keep us at bay. It doesn’t allow us to transform at scale.”
He also pointed to capital offset from exiting data centers and colocation facilities as part of the financial picture.
Advice for other health systems
Mr. Jamal, who said this is the third or fourth large-scale cloud migration he has worked on in his career, cautioned other health IT leaders against treating cloud adoption as a purely technical or financial project.
“Cloud strategy in isolation can become a pure infra play, and that’s not what it is,” he said. “You have to think in the context of the strategy of the enterprise.”
He also pushed back on the assumption that moving to the cloud automatically improves reliability.
“Cloud services on their own are not built for five nines,” Mr. Jamal said, referring to the standard for near-uninterrupted uptime. “One outage can interrupt the business in a much bigger way than our own data centers. We have to be judicious. We have to be very mindful on reliability at all times.”
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