SourceFuse recently sponsored and organized a Jax Tech MeetUp event, taking a deep dive into the world of enterprise data and analytics. At the event, we heard from Michael Privat, Vice President of Digital Cloud Migration from well-known local enterprise Availity.
No stranger to ‘big data’, Availity connects hundreds of healthcare providers with health insurance companies, providing an easier way to exchange data across this enormous network. Here, Michael shares his experience of Jax Tech and how large-scale cloud migration has contributed to the company’s success.
#1 How did you first come to hear about Jax Tech MeetUp & how does it differ from other networking events?
Jacksonville is a small-big town or a big-small town, however you look at it, so you get to hear a lot simply by word of mouth. One of the nice things about coming to the Jax Tech event was that I ran into a few old acquaintances I hadn’t seen in a while, so it was really great to reconnect.
You asked me about the differences but I’ll just start with the commonality with other MeetUps. One thing they have in common is that they’re very casual and very friendly, and this one is no exception. One thing that makes Jax Tech MeetUp different is that it’s not focused on a particular topic – there have been a lot of fun topics in the past; it’s very diverse, so you get a very diverse crowd.
The venue is also really nice – I think that’s really important! It’s very unique at the MOSH Museum, and ultimately the MeetUps are about bringing people together around fun and common interests, so Jax Tech is a great networking tool.
#2 How did your large-scale cloud migration strategy contribute towards extracting real value from your data?
There are plenty of studies that show how cloud implementations are consistently more scalable, more secure than on-premise implementation, but it implies the implementation is done well. By that I mean with a strong engineering discipline, which is one of the recurring themes in the talk that I gave – you can’t guess your way into the cloud.
You can take the simpler road of data migration to cloud, using the cloud as a data center and doing a sort of lift and shift cloud migration, but you’re not really resolving any problem. With that approach, security isn’t better, reliability isn’t better, scalability certainly isn’t better, but it’s more expensive. So really you just moved all your bad decisions into that new space.
Ultimately, you can’t just ‘hope’ for better security on the cloud, that’s not a very good strategy. You have to put in the work. I think the cloud tools are better and they yield better outcomes, but just like any other professional tool, even outside technology, you have to know what you’re doing to achieve optimum results.
#3 For large enterprises that may have concerns or reservations about cloud migration, what would your advice be?
Typically, people will say things like the need for executive alignment, and that’s 100% correct; if the C-suite isn’t with you on the large-scale cloud migration, you’ll definitely fail. Before embarking on a cloud migration, to get the C suite onboard unequivocally and irrevocably, it can be solved by doing a few things.
By far the most important is to educate yourself, educate your team completely – there’s no shortcut here. I’ve seen people take that shortcut and inevitably it ends badly. You don’t want to just surrender your thoughts to a third party, so educate yourself. You need to own the strategy and larger tactics that enable the migration because, being a very big choreography, you need to know how to direct this.
I would also advise people to not make this a technology-only effort. You don’t want to do cloud for cloud’s sake, you want to do it for a reason. Now obviously you can always go back and demonstrate the value in reliability, security, and scalability, and those are definitely technology-related. But there are also new opportunities on the cloud, such as faster implementations or access to big data analytics tools that you didn’t have before. We use AWS and they provide all sorts of natural language processing and AI tools that are ready to use out of the box.
There are also opportunities to improve processes. Bottom line is the cloud isn’t just the data center – you can’t treat it that way or else you’re going to fall short.
There’s also huge value that can be drawn from the mere fact of doing such a massive shift, which is simply the opportunity to correct old mistakes, to redo the things you wish you had known back then, which again goes back to educating yourself.
One last but very important thing is you have to mean it – you can’t start and not finish! You don’t want to be stuck in the ‘forever hybrid’ world where you have one foot on-prem and one foot in the cloud – that’s extremely expensive and very inefficient and should only be thought of as a transient phase. So, use your momentum to get across the bottom line.
Typically, companies have a kind of immune system that kicks in when you bring in change. With such a dramatic change, the immune system goes in full force and you’ve got to be ready and know how to deal with this.
#4 What does the future hold in terms of healthcare data storage, security, and leveraging analytics?
I think intuitively everyone knows that there’s more and more information flowing through all of these interconnected systems – that’s obvious. At Availity we are deeply committed to making sure that we keep all of that information secure and the cloud provides a lot of tools that we didn’t have before to add more layers of security.
But you’re right, analytics is a big topic. One of the big reasons to migrate to the cloud is access to the required scale – the ability to leverage machine learning to enable analytics. You’ll see that there will be a lot of new use cases that come out of this to improve the healthcare system in general. There’s a lot of insights that we can get from the data to make it better; in our case we’re merely custodians of the data that we host.
We’re doing a lot of work to partner with the various health plans, the healthcare providers, and all the other data owners. We’re collaborating daily on creating useful analytics and machine learning models that will improve their workflows and also data accuracy. The value that we’re collaboratively creating for the healthcare industry is ultimately in the service of the patients.
Using all of this data to create better insights is the most important purpose in making the patient’s journey through our healthcare system more and more efficient with better outcomes. So yes, I predict that data will play an ever-growing role in the future in the healthcare industry.
