Overview
The healthcare market is generally considered slow moving; however, new drugs and treatments are in demand and a newer, faster, yet still secure method of getting those advancements to market was needed. CareCloud, a leading provider of cloud-based revenue cycle management (RCM), practice management (PM), electronic health record (EHR), and patient engagement solutions began searching for a partner to help them speed to market Farsight Genome’s industry-leading advancements in genomic testing. They found the right partner in ClearDATA, the only healthcare-exclusive HIPAA and HITRUST-certified cloud solutions provider.
The Challenge
Limited by on-site, physical data centers, CareCloud struggled to be as nimble and innovative as it wanted to be for its clients. “We had a large operations team managing co-located data centers, and we spent a lot of time, money, and energy maintaining our platform,” says former CareCloud Chief Technology Officer Josh Siegel. “We needed to spend more of our time innovating. Our goal as a company is to offer new applications and user experiences that make physicians’ jobs better.”
The solution to fast-paced innovation and scalability was the cloud; however, the company needed to make sure it would still be able to meet its customers’ compliance requirements. “Compliance is not an afterthought when you’re dealing with patient data,” Siegel says. “We have to engineer for compliance and auditability.” In addition, CareCloud needed to streamline as much of the development process as possible to address their changing needs, and the cloud allowed for just such innovation.
The Solution
CareCloud partnered with ClearDATA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate its practice management application platform to the ClearDATA Healthcare Managed Cloud on AWS. Although the migration did not take long to complete, CareCloud reported a noticeable performance improvement immediately following migration. CareCloud runs the platform on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. “This is a compute-heavy domain, because we do a lot of real-time data processing,” says Siegel. “We have tens of thousands of simultaneous users on our applications, so having distributed, highly available, powerful compute nodes is essential.”
Additionally, CareCloud uses the ClearDATA automation stack to drive down provisioning times and automatically store HIPAA-compliant images. The company also utilizes the ClearDATA DevSecOps service, which supports CareCloud’s continuous integration and deployment efforts.
The Results
Utilizing the ClearDATA on AWS solution, CareCloud is now able to focus on scalable development and innovation, and not spend so much time and effort managing everyday IT operations or compliance. “Running our SaaS platform on ClearDATA on the AWS Cloud takes a lot of guesswork out of compliance and high availability,” says Siegel. “That gives us fewer things to manage, so we can spend our time creating new features that help us grow right alongside our high-performing practice clients.”
The company has dramatically enhanced its compliance capabilities by leveraging the ClearDATA Compliance Dashboard, which allows CareCloud to mitigate HIPAA Compliance audit risk by providing a real-time account of all cloud API activity.
“Healthcare is moving very quickly today, so working with a partner that is completely focused on healthcare technology and compliance frees us to continue innovating, so we can offer the best experience to physicians and practices,” says Siegel. And with a client base of over 17,500 medical professionals working at more than 5,000 medical offices, being able to scale at speed is critical.
To read our most recent CareCloud case study (2019), click here.
