Mercy Technology Services, the IT backbone of one of the largest Catholic health systems in the nation, has launched a new healthcare cloud service designed to meet the needs of the highly regulated healthcare market.
IT execs at the St. Louis-based Mercy said cloud hosting offers efficiency, flexibility and cost-effectiveness that make it preferable to infrastructure-heavy enterprise data centers.
"Healthcare's tech leaders want to migrate to get the cloud's benefits without the cloud's risks, but a good solution has been hard to find," said Scott Richert, Mercy's vice president of enterprise infrastructure. "This is the same equipment I'd buy for my enterprise data centers, with the same high service standard we hold for ourselves. Now there's a way to share enterprise-class cloud hosting with our healthcare community."
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Mercy Technology Services, one of Healthcare IT News' Best Hospital IT Departments, knows firsthand the unique hosting needs of healthcare as the IT shared services arm of Mercy, a 40-plus hospital health system.
Mercy's healthcare cloud is supported by Mercy Technology Services' HIPAA-compliant, SSAE 16-compliant and SOC2-compliant data centers, where it hosts Mercy's roughly 1,200 healthcare applications, including the Epic EHR for Mercy and commercial customers.
Mercy Technology Services will provide the cloud infrastructure for hosting mission-critical apps like the EHR and imaging, as well as business-essential systems like email, file shares or any other healthcare workload.
Mercy is part of the VMware Cloud Provider Program, and Mercy Technology Services' cloud service runs on VMware vSphere, a virtualization platform for building cloud infrastructures.
By leveraging a common cloud infrastructure customers can move workloads between their private data centers and Mercy Technology Services' cloud, and leverage the Mercy Technology Services cloud service for increased flexibility, security and IT agility, officials from Mercy Technology Services said.
The new healthcare cloud and managed services will be available from Mercy Technology Services beginning late spring 2018 and will supplement Mercy's portfolio of IT systems, which includes Epic as a service, backup and recovery as a service, imaging as a service, healthcare analytics and more.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com