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 Today in Health it, this story is Kaiser's big Cloud deal with Microsoft. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in health. It. A channel dedicated to keeping Health IT staff current and engaged today, no sponsor. Just wanna make you aware of a service that we offer.

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With a summary, bullet points and two to four short video clips, subscribe on our website this week, health.com. Just click on the subscribe button and have your team subscribe as well and you can get a discussion started this morning. Alright to today's story. Today's story is Kaiser Permanente has signed a significant deal with Microsoft to move to the cloud, and I think it's also with Accenture.

We will find that out in a minute. So let's just go to the article. This is a healthcare IT news article. It goes on to say, with 12.4 million members and more than 85,000 clinicians, Kaiser Permanente has a lot of incentive to find ways to improve how care delivery works for all of them. Its cloud expansion aims to deliver relevant digital experiences for both these groups, enabling more nimble digital innovation, the need to adapt agilely.

Which I guess is the verb for agile to new patient expectations and new accountable care imperatives will guide the collaboration with Microsoft and Accenture. According to Kaiser, it goes on to say, by scaling an array of new initiatives on the Azure hosted platform, the health system says it's taken advantage of, even its stronger cloud computing power and more expansive decision support analytics for care teams.

And those are two of the reasons that people are moving to the cloud. The focus is on giving Kaiser Permanente more timely and personalized care official set with privacy and security on top. So for those of you who are worried, and I'll touch on that in a minute about hipaa, I will touch on that in just a second.

Hold on, I'll get there in a minute. The last paragraph here that we are going to read, Kaiser Permanente's Bold, move to the Cloud at speed and Scale builds on its decade long history of innovation. Set Accenture, CEO, Julie Sweet in a statement. By collaborating with Accenture and Microsoft to replatform digital assets and further leverage insights and intelligence, Kaiser Permanente is empowering their clinicians and patients to customize care with more and better data.

I don't know how bold or innovative it is. It's, it's, you know, it's a fast follower, I guess is what I would say more than anything. They're, they're not the first, and we were doing this a long time ago. I'll talk about that in a minute. So, uh, who are they following? Well, you know, this is a 10 year deal.

Kaiser Permanente with Microsoft Mayo Clinic signed a 10 year deal with Google and they're doing some really interesting things on the data platform, and they're expanding that, and they're inviting others to participate in that. So that is how they're utilizing it. Providence signed a significant deal, I think it was a 10 year deal, probably about two years ago.

With Microsoft as well. You saw their chat bot come out on that. Uh, you, I'm sure they're moving their data centers over to Azure and I know that they're moving their data platforms up there as well. So you have a lot of stuff going on with Providence and probably one of the most talked about was Ascension.

I. Only because it got brought up under privacy concerns and whatnot. So Ascension signed a significant deal with Google. I actually like what Ascension's doing, if you think about it. They have a hundred hospitals and they had a choice of how to really bring all their data together and create the reporting that they needed to create.

And what they decided to do is go to Google. Google front ends, all the EHRs, all the various different EHRs. It harmonize its data. They created a clinical . Platform where clinicians can log in there and now they can do really advanced things on top of that. And create, I don't know, just modern interfaces for, uh, for front-ending the, uh, the EHRs on the backend.

So a really interesting approach. I actually like it a lot. Uh, they could have gone the EHR route. We're gonna harmonize by getting every EHR to be the same. That would've cost them probably, uh, more than the money would've cost them five years of time. Of just completely focused on that, uh, migration and that would've set them back.

Uh, as I said, probably about five years of just focusing on that while everybody else is really moving to the next step. Okay, here's my so what for this, really expect more health systems to make this move. Uh, but you're gonna wanna be aware of one mistake. This is what I said on LinkedIn. I'm gonna come back to that at the end.

You know, there's two directions I'm gonna go on this. The, the first is the move makes a lot of sense for Kaiser and it did for each of these other companies. For those concerned about hipaa, I can guarantee you that the lawyers, lawyers of these companies are really good and the protection is in place for those worried about latency.

And the cloud not being on premise. It's time to come into this century. My, my two largest data stores on this laptop I'm running from my home right now are Google Drive in Box. The performance difference is negligible, and I have an SSD drive and I, I now have access to zetabytes of storage on my laptop.

We used to have departments way back in the day, argue that they needed to have their servers in a closet near them because the distance to the data center was too great and caused latency. You know what happened? Ethernet was re-architected. 'cause we used to have this collision architecture on coax cable and they were right.

I mean, if you moved it into the data center, it could create latency. But you know what? Ethernet got re-architected speeds. Increased of ethernet software was rewritten and dedicated data technologies emerged. The result, no one remembered why we kept the servers under the CFO's desk. The same is happening here.

We actually moved a fair number of our transactional systems up to the cloud. Our PAC system ran on the cloud, not the VNA. The transactional PAC system ran in the cloud. This is a freight train coming to a health system near you. Agility is the primary reason, but access to advanced tools is another driver.

No one is going to build out the capabilities that AWS Google and Azure are going to. You can look at other competitors and even consider a private cloud, but you are delaying the inevitable. I'm sure you'll get a a, you know, we're gonna get a lot of chances to talk about this 'cause there's, there's gonna be more releases this year, more health systems moving.

So I'm gonna save some of those thoughts for LA later. Uh, the other direction that I mentioned earlier that I want to touch on is if you're a startup vendor, look at this press release. This is the kind of press that's worth at least two more sales. Get your buyer to agree to it when you are signing the deal.

It's when they're most likely to, to agree to it. Give them an appropriate discount for doing this work and associating their name with your product. It's just really good business. Okay, I promised on LinkedIn to talk about the one mistake that you have to avoid and that is vendor lockin. You signed a 10 year deal, great.

But you have to be able to pick up and move it out of that cloud in 10 years. Otherwise, you're, you're, it's, it's more than a 10 year deal. Look closely at the contract, look at the fees, pay close attention to the architecture. Or you may find yourself in the Hotel California of cloud deals. You can check in anytime you want.

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