The Client:
The Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN) is Michigan’s statewide health information network, securely
connecting hospitals, pharmacies, health insurance providers, doctors and specialists to help deliver the best care for Michigan residents. MiHIN represents a growing network of public and private organizations working to overcome data sharing barriers, reduce costs, and ultimately advance the health of Michigan’s population.
The Challenge:
Every time a hospital admits, discharges, or transfers a patient in the state of Michigan, MiHIN receives a message. MiHIN handles millions of patient messages each week, with that volume steadily increasing. To keep pace with this growth, MiHIN needed a more scalable, secure and cost-effective solution.
MiHIN’s on-premises data centers struggled to keep up with demand, leading to outages and inefficiencies. Additionally, VPN connections created security vulnerabilities. In 2015, MiHIN faced a critical decision: invest heavily in hardware updates or migrate to the cloud.
The cloud emerged as the clear solution for MiHIN’s most salient needs: scalability, security, and cost efficiency. MiHIN partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider and AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Cloudticity.
The Solution:
MiHIN recognized its numerous VPN connections presented a hurdle to cloud adoption. Cloudicity’s solution enabled MiHIN to leverage secure API tools available in the cloud, utilizing Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificate exchange, significantly mitigating a key barrier to cloud migration. Without this, new VPN connections would have to be created for every site that relies on them.
With the VPN issue addressed, the first step was migrating MiHIN's servers to the cloud. Cloudticity deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes for EC2 storage, and Amazon Relational Database (RDS) as an initial database solution. This initial step provided a robust foundation but wasn't the end goal. MiHIN wanted to become a cloud-native organization, fully embracing serverless and PaaS (Platform as a Service) technologies and developing cloud-native applications. Today, MiHIN uses AWS Lambda with EBS, and Amazon Neptune graph database for deeper data insights.
Cloudticity helped MiHIN architect for high availability using Amazon Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) and Autoscaling Groups. Today, it always has the right size infrastructure for any given workload.
With Cloudticity Oxygen™, Cloudticity’s proprietary cloud management solution, managing the environment, MiHIN’s software resources are preconfigured to be secure and HIPAA compliant, ensuring that instances deployed by employees always meet organizational standards.
The Benefits:
Since migrating to the cloud, MiHIN’s whole business model has changed. Previously, it operated as a traditional health information exchange (HIE), brokering patient data to healthcare entities, but today it does much more. The cloud’s agility has allowed MiHIN to develop and deploy proprietary applications and features at a rapid scale and pace, positioning it as an innovator in the space.
Additionally, the cloud empowers MiHIN to leverage novel technologies like graph databases (powered by Amazon Neptune), to extract deeper insights from previously fragmented healthcare data. This paves the way for future integration with artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM), further unlocking the potential for data-driven insights.
AWS has given MiHIN the scalability needed to expand nationally. Before the journey to the cloud, MiHIN operated in Michigan. Today, it processes patient data from all over the country, across 7 states, and counting. “We are positioned to handle the event volume for the entire country. We have essentially taken the technology/engineering problem off the table for that level of scalability,” says Tim Pletcher, Executive Director.
Now that MiHIN no longer has to worry about scalability, it can ask higher level questions, like: how do we ensure that we respect the preferences and consent of all the patients? How do we really enable healthcare to be patient-centric? And how do we leverage the aggregation power of AWS to get there?
“As a natural byproduct of where we are in the cloud, we’re able to expand from that traditional medical footprint into this much broader arena of social care and community services. We’re able to connect with schools, corrections facilities, state government, county, and city government. If we had not made the transition to cloud, this would be unimaginable,” says Pletcher.
MiHIN has experienced a significant improvement in uptime since migrating to the cloud. Its legacy system was plagued by outages, occurring every 60 days and taking three or more days to resolve. Today, its integrated technology platform has performed at 100% uptime for the two years it's been deployed. This dramatic improvement ensures uninterrupted access to critical patient data, fostering better care delivery.
MiHIN has the Cloudticity team to thank for enabling its transformation – but its cloud migration wasn’t just about technology. Beyond technical guidance, Cloudticity facilitated a crucial cultural shift, mitigating resistance and fostering skill transfer. Their deep understanding of both healthcare and cloud environments empowered MiHIN to fully leverage AWS. This powerful partnership transformed MiHIN from a traditional HIE into a healthcare innovator, with a diversified product portfolio and new revenue streams
“Cloudticity again and again understands what we’re trying to achieve from the perspective of the healthcare lens. They’ve been able to help us achieve not only our technology goals but also our clinical, patient, and public health goals.”
– Tim Pletcher, Executive Director, MiHIN and Velatura
To learn more about MiHIN and the important work it is doing to improve and advance the secure exchange of health information, visit www.mihin.org or follow them on LinkedIn or X.
Interested in modernizing your healthcare organization? Schedule a free consultation with Cloudticity to learn how we can work together.
