As a leader in his health system’s push to leverage technology to improve clinical care, Dr. Jeetu Nanda spends much of his time focused on matters related to data.
“The goal is to have all of our decisions be data-driven,” says Nanda, chief medical information officer at Greensboro, N.C.-based Cone Health. The organization relies on Epic for its electronic health record system.
“The key to everything is interoperability,” Nanda says, noting that some computer systems are better than others at exchanging and using information. “With Epic, we’re lucky because it lets us bring data from other facilities directly into the patient’s chart.”
This instant access to a patient’s health history is made possible with Epic’s Care Everywhere feature, but it also depends on the technologies that healthcare organizations use for data storage and management. Cone Health has long relied on NetApp for this purpose, Nanda says, and in 2021, the organization turned to two of the company’s tools — Azure NetApp Files and Cloud Volumes ONTAP — to move its Epic workloads to Microsoft Azure.
Previously, he says, Cone Health had housed patient data exclusively in its on-premises servers. That worked well — until it embraced digital transformation and the volume of data increased exponentially.
“There are a lot of benefits to the cloud, but one of the biggest is space,” Nanda says. “On Azure, you don’t care how much data comes in; there’s always room for more.”
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