3M Health Information Systems Case Study

3M HIS's software solutions are a critical part of the healthcare-system workflow for many organizations. “Our applications are the glue between patients, healthcare providers, and payers,” says David Frazee, chief technology officer of 3M Health Information Systems. “A core part of the solution uses natural-language processing to automatically create medical codes, which are critical to both clinicians and the business of healthcare delivery. Providers use our software solutions to efficiently manage their revenue-cycle operations, but can also use the results to identify deficiencies in clinical documentation and automatically recommend measures to eliminate them.”

Previously, 3M HIS relied on multiple IT centers and collocated environments to support its software solutions. However, this approach led to major challenges. For example, certain activities required more compute and storage capacity at certain hours of the day. “We spend approximately 18 hours per day processing at peak capacity,” says Rick Austin, manager of Advanced Technology at 3M Health Information Systems. “During the remaining six hours per day, as well as weekends, we were processing significantly off-peak, but still had to manage, maintain, and pay for the underlying unused compute environment during those times. We lacked the ability to efficiently support that ebb and flow associated with our various workloads.”

3M Health Information Systems also needed the agility to develop and deploy new applications faster. “Our ability to adequately support our researchers, scientists, and developers was not where it needed to be,” Austin says. “We wanted to lay the foundation necessary to reduce or eliminate barriers needed to increase the speed of innovation at HIS.”

3M Health Information Systems determined that moving to the cloud was the best way to address its challenges. “We knew the cloud was the only way to get the scalability, speed, and security our customers expect from 3M,” says Austin. The organization considered building its own private cloud and using solutions from cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). After a thorough analysis, 3M HIS found AWS to have the best infrastructure and performance to meet its needs. “One of our key processes operated 20 percent more efficiently on AWS than on any other platform, without changing our code,” Frazee says.

After choosing AWS, 3M HIS began migrating several important applications to the AWS Cloud. The organization worked closely with AWS Professional Services, which provided the expert architecture and configuration guidance required to accelerate the migration. “AWS Professional Services played an important role in the migration,” says Austin. “It’s one thing to provision servers, but it’s another to configure an environment that complies with strict security requirements. This would have been very difficult without the assistance from AWS Professional Services.”

3M HIS's applications run on hundreds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). 3M HIS also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which helps the organization operate and scale its relational database deployments.

Additionally, 3M HIS leverages the AWS-managed CodeCommit source-control service to host private Git repositories, AWS CodeDeploy to automate deployment, and AWS CloudFormation to automate infrastructure—all supporting a DevOps culture that includes using AWS CodePipeline to manage its continuous integration and continuous delivery deployment workflows. 3M HIS also meets a portion of its regulatory and security requirements by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Although 3M Health Information Systems employed a multi-cloud strategy and continues to host some applications in other data centers, it plans to rely more on AWS in the coming months. “We will move an additional dozen applications and services to AWS in the coming months,” says Frazee. “We see the cloud as the safest, most scalable, and most cost effective place to operate.”