Delegate Healthcare Technology, LLC is the North American-based division of Delegate Group, a global organization dedicated to creating cutting edge software solutions to solve daily workflow and supply chain challenges within large enterprise organizations with complex foodservice operations. As a subset of the broader features of the software that relate to supply chain, production and recipe management, multiple areas of functionality focus on the nutritional needs of patients in clinical settings and the delivery of individual patient information between the hospitals EMR and the food and culinary services operational departments.
Delegate got its start in the institutional foodservice industry over 30 years ago building technology to manage the complexities of large-scale employee feeding programs across Europe. The Delegate application was originally built as an on-premise solution and – much like the majority of software options available today – was required to run on their clients’ local servers. But that changed in 2018 when an RFP crossed the desks of Delegate with one of the USA’s largest acute care hospital networks (Trinity Health System) looking to modernize their food and nutrition services. The healthcare organization sought to not only address the growing need for a sophisticated foodservice software to centralize and standardize their operations, but they also saw a vision for a cloud-hosted application that was managed, secured and deployed by the vendor.
That is when Delegate Group’s North America Managing Director, David Edwards, saw an opportunity to harness the power of the public cloud. He responded to the RFP with the technical architecture already in-hand that was able to satisfy the forward-thinking needs of the healthcare organization’s IT requirements. The missing link was a Cloud Hosting Partner that could meet the stringent and ever-changing data security requirements of a large premier healthcare organization.
“We were getting very clear signals from the market that there was a desire for a cloud-based solution,” said David. “None of our known competitors had the ability to cloud host. With an eye on time to market, we knew that embarking on this initiative solo would not work and we would never have the internal manpower to meet those HITRUST and HIPAA data security requirements.”
And with that, Delegate won the RFP and partnered with Trinity Health, a network of 90+ hospitals across the US with ambitious goals for technology modernization and system-wide standardization. Trinity Health’s George Cranmer, Vice President of Hospitality and Support Services, eagerly worked with David and the Delegate team to design and fulfill his vision for this new cloud-enabled food and nutrition services solution in order to standardize and replace their disparate landscape of incumbent and legacy foodservice applications.
In order to fulfill the shared vision of a cloud-first SaaS model, what they needed was a partner with the staff and manpower to extend their technical teams and get the solution implemented into Trinity Health and on the market quickly. At the culmination of their research, Delegate engaged ClearDATA based not only in ClearDATA’s extensive security and compliance credentials, but especially its cloud acumen and reputation among other healthcare players. The engagement enabled Delegate to get their cloud solution stood up rapidly and securely with ClearDATA’s cloud services team, leaning on compliance automation and the highest standards of privacy, security and compliance to augment their solution and validate the Delegate solution’s security and compliance posture within the provider ecosystem – their prospects.
As Delegate and ClearDATA planned the best possible cloud infrastructure for the application’s cloud debut, they discussed and landed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the Cloud Services Provider (CSP) based on ClearDATA’s Premier partnership and deep roots with AWS. Additionally, AWS services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) facilitated the hosting and deployment capacity they needed to rapidly expand their customer base without much heavy lifting.
Recently, one of Delegate Healthcare Solution’s newest customers, Scion Health, deployed the company’s food and nutrition platform across 44 sites in less than eight months which was a testament to the technical architecture the application was built upon and the original vision of ease-to-scale that was proposed by Trinity Health. By utilizing both the software’s structure and the cloud-hosted environment provided by ClearDATA, that rapid pace was achievable, but would have been impossible in their original on-prem solution.
Since the North America division’s original foray in the public cloud, all Delegate global divisions have followed suit with their own cloud applications, servicing the needs of food production operations across the globe with new efficiency and speed – all while protecting patient privacy. The company is able to leverage their relationship with ClearDATA to validate their premier privacy and security posture in the cloud for hospital system prospects, creating peace of mind for both IT and Security / Compliance leadership.
“Not only did ClearDATA initially take us by the hand and get us to market in the cloud months faster than we could have alone,” said Edwards. “But they have continued to take real ownership and responsibility for our application, its compliance posture and its security. There is a deep sense of shared responsibility because we don’t have a robust internal IT department, but ClearDATA protects us.”
Delegate Group is excited to be planning the next phases of their cloud journey with ClearDATA as they continue a large-scale modernization initiative which will culminate in Q4 of 2022 and further streamline the needs of large healthcare organizations.
