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    Private Cloud Frees P3 Health Partners To Focus On Managing Patient Data, Not IT

    Overview

    case-study-logo-p3-health-partners-200x200

    A hosted private cloud solution from Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), backed by business continuity services, frees P3 Health Partners (P3) from having to build, staff and manage a data center, so it can maintain focus on its key mission: helping physicians fix an ailing healthcare system.

    Solutions

    • Hosted Private Cloud
    • Backup and Replication
    • Disaster Recovery

    Results

    • Dedicated environment with multiple security layers
    • Key contribution to HITRUST CSF certification
    • Real-time replication, 30-minute Recovery Time Objective
    • Managed services for reduced staffing demands
    • Nearly 50 percent savings, compared to public cloud

    About the Company

    P3 Health Partners is a health population management group founded and led by physicians who want to shift the focus from managing illness to cultivating wellness. Founded in 2015, P3 has operations in Nevada, Oregon, Arizona and Florida, where teams of people—from doctors and clinicians to support service professionals—share a passion and purpose to improve patient care. Today, P3 extends its realm of care to more than 100,000 total patients, 65,000 of whom are in a Medicare Advantage (MA) plan.

    Sungard AS frees us to support our applications and data, not the infrastructure. After all, we’re in the healthcare industry, not the hardware industry.

    VP of Information Services
    P3 Health Partners

    Challenge

    Today, healthcare is often characterized by long wait times, short office visits and disjointed care delivery — all of which can put a patient’s health in jeopardy. This adds pressure on providers, physicians and practices as they strive to improve the healthcare system.

    That’s why P3’s mission is to help the three Ps — providers, physicians and practices — move from traditional, volume-based models to value-based systems of care and wellness.

    Founded by fellow healthcare professionals, P3 understands the unique challenges that come with that transition. As a population health management company, P3 contracts with health plans and other organizations to gather and analyze mountains of clinical and administrative data. Armed with that information, they can identify at-risk members of the population, so patients and providers can work together to improve overall health.

    To host the critical applications needed to accomplish this—from claims and disease management to care management and data warehouse systems—P3 needed an alternative to its in-house data center, especially given the strict security regulations that govern the industry.

    “As a healthcare company, we’re charged with keeping patient data safe, so security is at the forefront of everything we do,” explains P3’s Vice President of Information Services, Devery Goodey. “Just keeping up with the ever-changing ways people attempt to compromise data is difficult. We need to have layers of security in place to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible.”

    The data-intensive processes involved in population health management also called for a high level of IT performance, as well as a solution with the capacity to back up nearly eight terabytes of data, representing 11 years of health records.

    With employees and customers relying on P3 data, having a highly available, fully recoverable environment was an imperative. And, for a company only two years old with a small IT staff, keeping costs down was important.

    “We need to focus on delivering data, not an infrastructure,” says Goodey. “With Sungard AS, we have a dedicated environment for our critical applications, without the cost and complexity of running and managing it ourselves.”

    With Sungard AS, we have a dedicated environment for our critical applications, without the cost and complexity of running and managing it ourselves.

     

    Solution

    A secure, certified environment

    Now, a hosted private cloud in a Sungard AS data center provides the dedicated performance, high availability and tight security P3 needs. Cloud pricing keeps costs in line as the company grows and adds more services.

    Nearly 400 employees spread across four states connect to applications and data in the cloud, comprising hundreds of Windows-based servers running in a VMware environment.

    The physical and virtual security features of a Sungard AS data center elevate P3’s security posture. Multiple layers of firewalls within the private cloud infrastructure further fortify protection, readying P3 for safeguarding patient data, even amidst increasing threats.

    “With COVID, the U.S. healthcare industry has become a prime target,” says Goodey, noting the ransomware warnings issued by the FBI, Homeland Security and other government entities near the end of 2019. “If you have an open network with no firewalls between, you open yourself up to a lot of damage. With separate firewalls between each virtual network, the Sungard AS environment enabled us to be more proactive about our protection.”

    Each year, P3’s environment receives certification from the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST).

    “For us, having a relationship with Sungard AS has been key to receiving certification. A lot of the security controls we need actually fall under their umbrella, such as maintaining backups, encryption and firewall rules,” Goodey says.

    "Being able to have infrastructure provided to us as a service alleviates us from the burden of having to maintain security controls ourselves.”

    A managed, tested and resilient connected cloud

    To let P3 staff attend to other priorities, Sungard AS manages the hardware infrastructure, up to and including the operating system, as well as patches and updates. For uninterrupted access, Sungard AS backs up critical systems hourly, while others are backed up nightly. The full environment, including the eight terabytes of medical records, is backed up weekly.

    A web portal provides visibility and control into the infrastructure. Goodey receives daily performance and backup reports but can also access the portal to create other reports or to submit tickets and changes that need to be made.

    P3 also takes advantage of disaster recovery services from Sungard AS. While the primary data center is in Aurora, Colo., data replicates to a geographically separated secondary data center in Philadelphia, Pa. This solution is covered by a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 8 hours, with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 4 hours.

    “The ability to have fully redundant systems replicated in real time, and all within the Sungard AS infrastructure, is a huge benefit for us,” Goodey says, adding the importance of annual testing.

    "Testing gives us a better understanding of how long we really need to access the environment, from start to finish,” he continues. “You have your SLAs (service level agreements), but to actually go through the recovery process is different. It helps us set expectations about what needs to be done before the environment is fully available to us.”

    Results

    Dedicated support team cuts staffing costs

    Goodey appreciates being able to access a pool of Sungard AS experts from different technology areas to field questions about the infrastructure, whether they’re about firewalls, servers or other parts of the solution.

    “There are people with a deep level of knowledge we can call upon, who can jump on the phone to help us make decisions,” he says. A client service executive leads the team, delivering what Goodey calls a “concierge type of service.”

    “Having a dedicated point person from Sungard AS makes a world of difference,” Goodey continues. “If we went somewhere else, we’d probably be shoved through a normal ticketing system. Now, we reach out, submit a ticket and it gets escalated quickly. To me, that’s the value Sungard AS brings to the table for us.”

    He estimates P3 would have to employ as many as seven people to provide the same service. “When you factor in the staffing that would be required to maintain the same infrastructure, that’s where the biggest cost savings comes in.”

    The hosted private cloud also provides a cost-effective alternative to other solutions, including a public cloud. “We did a comparison to see what the same services would cost to deliver within a Microsoft Azure environment and it was almost double,” Goodey reports.

    Speed and scalability for expanded services

    P3 recently expanded storage for both the primary and secondary data centers to handle the terabytes of data moving between them. The cloud also provides a fast and flexible platform for growth, as well as for introducing new services or upgrading existing applications.

    "Scalability is essential to the growth of P3’s business,” says Goodey. “We have projects that come up that need rapid deployment, so it’s a priority for us to be able to build and set up new applications in a quick manner. We also have the ability to burst, then roll back when needed to respond to fluctuations that occur throughout the month. This will all be important as we go forward.”

    To further manage future growth, P3 is exploring the next evolution of private cloud. “This new generation will still let us maintain our private security level, while giving us the flexibility to expand more rapidly at the hardware level,” Goodey explains.

    For other companies with similar challenges to P3, he offers this advice: “Trust in Sungard AS, because they do a great job. They free us to support our applications and data, not the infrastructure. After all, we’re in the healthcare industry, not the hardware industry."

    Having a dedicated point person from Sungard AS makes a world of difference. If we went somewhere else, we’d probably be shoved through a normal ticketing system. Now, we reach out, submit a ticket and it gets escalated quickly. To me, that’s the value Sungard AS brings to the table for us.

    VP of Information Services
    P3 Health Partners

    case-study-logo-p3-health-partners-200x200

    A hosted private cloud solution from Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS), backed by business continuity services, frees P3 Health Partners (P3) from having to build, staff and manage a data center, so it can maintain focus on its key mission: helping physicians fix an ailing healthcare system.

    Solutions

    • Hosted Private Cloud
    • Backup and Replication
    • Disaster Recovery

    Results

    • Dedicated environment with multiple security layers
    • Key contribution to HITRUST CSF certification
    • Real-time replication, 30-minute Recovery Time Objective
    • Managed services for reduced staffing demands
    • Nearly 50 percent savings, compared to public cloud

    About the Company

    P3 Health Partners is a health population management group founded and led by physicians who want to shift the focus from managing illness to cultivating wellness. Founded in 2015, P3 has operations in Nevada, Oregon, Arizona and Florida, where teams of people—from doctors and clinicians to support service professionals—share a passion and purpose to improve patient care. Today, P3 extends its realm of care to more than 100,000 total patients, 65,000 of whom are in a Medicare Advantage (MA) plan.

    Sungard AS frees us to support our applications and data, not the infrastructure. After all, we’re in the healthcare industry, not the hardware industry.

    VP of Information Services
    P3 Health Partners

    Today, healthcare is often characterized by long wait times, short office visits and disjointed care delivery — all of which can put a patient’s health in jeopardy. This adds pressure on providers, physicians and practices as they strive to improve the healthcare system.

    That’s why P3’s mission is to help the three Ps — providers, physicians and practices — move from traditional, volume-based models to value-based systems of care and wellness.

    Founded by fellow healthcare professionals, P3 understands the unique challenges that come with that transition. As a population health management company, P3 contracts with health plans and other organizations to gather and analyze mountains of clinical and administrative data. Armed with that information, they can identify at-risk members of the population, so patients and providers can work together to improve overall health.

    To host the critical applications needed to accomplish this—from claims and disease management to care management and data warehouse systems—P3 needed an alternative to its in-house data center, especially given the strict security regulations that govern the industry.

    “As a healthcare company, we’re charged with keeping patient data safe, so security is at the forefront of everything we do,” explains P3’s Vice President of Information Services, Devery Goodey. “Just keeping up with the ever-changing ways people attempt to compromise data is difficult. We need to have layers of security in place to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible.”

    The data-intensive processes involved in population health management also called for a high level of IT performance, as well as a solution with the capacity to back up nearly eight terabytes of data, representing 11 years of health records.

    With employees and customers relying on P3 data, having a highly available, fully recoverable environment was an imperative. And, for a company only two years old with a small IT staff, keeping costs down was important.

    “We need to focus on delivering data, not an infrastructure,” says Goodey. “With Sungard AS, we have a dedicated environment for our critical applications, without the cost and complexity of running and managing it ourselves.”

    With Sungard AS, we have a dedicated environment for our critical applications, without the cost and complexity of running and managing it ourselves.

     

    A secure, certified environment

    Now, a hosted private cloud in a Sungard AS data center provides the dedicated performance, high availability and tight security P3 needs. Cloud pricing keeps costs in line as the company grows and adds more services.

    Nearly 400 employees spread across four states connect to applications and data in the cloud, comprising hundreds of Windows-based servers running in a VMware environment.

    The physical and virtual security features of a Sungard AS data center elevate P3’s security posture. Multiple layers of firewalls within the private cloud infrastructure further fortify protection, readying P3 for safeguarding patient data, even amidst increasing threats.

    “With COVID, the U.S. healthcare industry has become a prime target,” says Goodey, noting the ransomware warnings issued by the FBI, Homeland Security and other government entities near the end of 2019. “If you have an open network with no firewalls between, you open yourself up to a lot of damage. With separate firewalls between each virtual network, the Sungard AS environment enabled us to be more proactive about our protection.”

    Each year, P3’s environment receives certification from the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST).

    “For us, having a relationship with Sungard AS has been key to receiving certification. A lot of the security controls we need actually fall under their umbrella, such as maintaining backups, encryption and firewall rules,” Goodey says.

    "Being able to have infrastructure provided to us as a service alleviates us from the burden of having to maintain security controls ourselves.”

    A managed, tested and resilient connected cloud

    To let P3 staff attend to other priorities, Sungard AS manages the hardware infrastructure, up to and including the operating system, as well as patches and updates. For uninterrupted access, Sungard AS backs up critical systems hourly, while others are backed up nightly. The full environment, including the eight terabytes of medical records, is backed up weekly.

    A web portal provides visibility and control into the infrastructure. Goodey receives daily performance and backup reports but can also access the portal to create other reports or to submit tickets and changes that need to be made.

    P3 also takes advantage of disaster recovery services from Sungard AS. While the primary data center is in Aurora, Colo., data replicates to a geographically separated secondary data center in Philadelphia, Pa. This solution is covered by a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 8 hours, with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 4 hours.

    “The ability to have fully redundant systems replicated in real time, and all within the Sungard AS infrastructure, is a huge benefit for us,” Goodey says, adding the importance of annual testing.

    "Testing gives us a better understanding of how long we really need to access the environment, from start to finish,” he continues. “You have your SLAs (service level agreements), but to actually go through the recovery process is different. It helps us set expectations about what needs to be done before the environment is fully available to us.”

    Dedicated support team cuts staffing costs

    Goodey appreciates being able to access a pool of Sungard AS experts from different technology areas to field questions about the infrastructure, whether they’re about firewalls, servers or other parts of the solution.

    “There are people with a deep level of knowledge we can call upon, who can jump on the phone to help us make decisions,” he says. A client service executive leads the team, delivering what Goodey calls a “concierge type of service.”

    “Having a dedicated point person from Sungard AS makes a world of difference,” Goodey continues. “If we went somewhere else, we’d probably be shoved through a normal ticketing system. Now, we reach out, submit a ticket and it gets escalated quickly. To me, that’s the value Sungard AS brings to the table for us.”

    He estimates P3 would have to employ as many as seven people to provide the same service. “When you factor in the staffing that would be required to maintain the same infrastructure, that’s where the biggest cost savings comes in.”

    The hosted private cloud also provides a cost-effective alternative to other solutions, including a public cloud. “We did a comparison to see what the same services would cost to deliver within a Microsoft Azure environment and it was almost double,” Goodey reports.

    Speed and scalability for expanded services

    P3 recently expanded storage for both the primary and secondary data centers to handle the terabytes of data moving between them. The cloud also provides a fast and flexible platform for growth, as well as for introducing new services or upgrading existing applications.

    "Scalability is essential to the growth of P3’s business,” says Goodey. “We have projects that come up that need rapid deployment, so it’s a priority for us to be able to build and set up new applications in a quick manner. We also have the ability to burst, then roll back when needed to respond to fluctuations that occur throughout the month. This will all be important as we go forward.”

    To further manage future growth, P3 is exploring the next evolution of private cloud. “This new generation will still let us maintain our private security level, while giving us the flexibility to expand more rapidly at the hardware level,” Goodey explains.

    For other companies with similar challenges to P3, he offers this advice: “Trust in Sungard AS, because they do a great job. They free us to support our applications and data, not the infrastructure. After all, we’re in the healthcare industry, not the hardware industry."

    Having a dedicated point person from Sungard AS makes a world of difference. If we went somewhere else, we’d probably be shoved through a normal ticketing system. Now, we reach out, submit a ticket and it gets escalated quickly. To me, that’s the value Sungard AS brings to the table for us.

    VP of Information Services
    P3 Health Partners