Automated HealthCare Solutions (AHCS) built multiple in-house applications using its data centers and private cloud platform. After 15 years, the platform was not keeping pace with the company’s growth and ever-changing federal and state regulations. As a result, AHCS wanted to move the applications to a public cloud system to provide on-demand scalability and reduce management and maintenance. AHCS partnered with OZ to migrate its applications to the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform. As a result of the migration, AHCS’ apps and processes are secure, scalable, fast, and all in a single easily-accessible location.
AHCS Overview
Based in Miramar, Fla., AHCS provides ancillary solutions that streamline contact between doctors, patients, and insurers. They make it easy for physicians to verify insurance coverage and guarantee payment. AHCS is the Florida Medical Association’s preferred provider for technology-enabled medication dispensing solutions.
AHCS’s Business Needs
AHCS’s existing enterprise cloud platform was created 15 years ago and managed 12 years of workers’ comp claims, multiple applications, and 70,000 payor business rules, along with federal and state healthcare regulations. It was difficult for AHCS to scale its solutions due to the combination of legacy systems and the size and complexity of their databases. Additionally, maintenance issues were complex and time-consuming.
The biggest challenge ACHS faced was that their applications could not be moved to a public cloud in one shot because the implementation required secure integration with on-premise applications. AHCS partnered with OZ to provide an overall solution that migrated all in-house applications to the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform.
OZ’s Distinctive Advantage
OZ approached the cloud planning and migration process for AHCS by providing their IT leaders a comprehensive assessment of their current application environment, security needs, and technology consumption, providing the architecture and roadmap to a new, secure, high performing, and scalable Azure cloud. This provided AHCS with a clear cloud migration architecture and roadmap for their future state Azure Cloud.
OZ then designed and developed the cloud migration solution, creating APIs that integrated the existing applications’ logic into the Azure API Gateway. OZ then created secure site-to-site virtual network connections, enabling the cloud applications to “talk” to applications on-premises and vice versa. Finally, OZ helped AHCS modernize some of the applications using Platform as a Service (PaaS-based) offerings on Microsoft Azure; including Blob Storage, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, logic apps, functions, Redis, Azure Service Bus, .NET Core, Microservices via Docker and Kubernetes, and application insights.
Unification of Applications Outcome
- Successfully migrated all mission-critical AHCS applications to the Azure Cloud.
- All newly developed applications are using Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and PaaS-based Cloud Services.
- The AHCS Azure cloud is fully secure, adheres to all federal and state healthcare regulations yet is highly interoperable.
- The new Azure cloud is much more efficient and cost-effective yet has higher resources and availability for a certain application.
- Due to PaaS cloud-based services, maintenance and patching have been minimized significantly.