Founded in 1992, ARMUS Corporation supports quality improvement in the medical industry by hosting applications and data that power clinical reports. As an industry leader, they were one of the first to switch to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model after the Internet boom, allowing them to provide real-time service to several hundred hospitals across the nation from their central servers.
As part of ongoing changes in healthcare legislation, additions to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandated stricter regulations and penalties surrounding the access, storage, and transfer of electronic patient health information (ePHI). Adherence to HIPAA changed from a soft “follow the spirit of the law” to a hard “follow the letter of the law”. Electronic health record IT environments have to meet a series of stringent checks, where true adherence can only be certified via verification of an independent auditor. ARMUS knew they were facing a mass-migration of their IT infrastructure, and they had to do it quickly.
To achieve the uptime and reliability demanded by the healthcare industry while ensuring that systems and information complied with HIPAA, ARMUS chose Lunavi infrastructure, which is purpose built for cloud-ready healthcare applications.
“We had a very aggressive timeline,” said Adam Barna, IT Director, ARMUS. “But we also could not impact stability.”
ARMUS needed a platform with a high performance level to deliver real-time results to clients. While businesses of all industries continue to transition to always-on environments, in a healthcare setting, 24/7 access is even more vital.
“We’ve spent over a decade and a half developing applications that help our clients collect information and analyze it to see how they are doing with quality measures like mortality, complication, and length of stay,” said Gyula Sziraczky, President, ARMUS. “A company like ours depends on the service 100% of the time – every single penny which we make is coming out of that service, and we did everything humanly possible to figure out the best possible partner.”
As many organizations who have shifted to the cloud understand, it’s not always as easy as just flipping a switch. Migrating from an off-site data center meant careful considerations to mitigate risk, test for production performance, and transition smoothly.
“We required cloud scalability and flexibility,” said Barna. “But hosting our production systems there was new for us. From a technical perspective, we worked very closely with the Lunavi team on the architecture so we could go live with confidence.”
Additionally, ARMUS can move releases quickly within their VMware-based cloud to help accelerate time to market. The DevOps friendly environment helps them integrate builds and orchestrate provisioning, within a consistent deployment methodology that minimizes errors. Their infrastructure environment allows for real time scaling on demand, but also dynamic contraction to control costs.
“Self-service was important to us, but we also wanted to streamline the dev and ops handoffs, and take advantage of automation whenever possible,” said Barna.
In order to participate in the field of health procedure quality at the national level, ARMUS had already completed a certification for cardiac surgery and cardiology, and with patient data at stake, they were already extremely security focused.
“We are the only company right now in the U.S. that’s providing this type of tool for data-savvy regional groups to maintain registries that are completely compatible with national initiatives,” said Sziraczky.
With so many cloud providers in the marketplace, ARMUS looked not only for HIPAA compliance, but a pathway to accelerate the process. Access to cloud technicians and engineers with HIPAA know-how helped get the environment up and running quickly. Security services, offsite Backup-as-a-Service, and network monitoring let ARMUS focus on their business instead of managing infrastructure.
“Our companies feel similar to me,” said Barna. “We prize flexibility, responsiveness, and service for our customers. Lunavi obviously does also.”
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