Hospitals retrain data center employees amid shift to the cloud

Mount Sinai Health System recently kicked off a massive cloud migration, with plans to move about 80% of applications to off-site data centers over the next three years.

The New York-based health system is just getting started. The company is setting up a testing and training environment to ensure applications will work as expected after the change, said Kristin Myers, Mount Sinai’s executive vice president, chief information officer and dean for information technology. Myers expects applications to begin running in the cloud by the end of the year.

Health systems are making this shift to save money by shuttering on-site data centers and to take advantage of artificial intelligence and other technical tools available through cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Mount Sinai struck a five-year deal with Microsoft’s cloud arm Azure for its transition.

The health system also has a staffing issue to resolve amid the change. Moving data and applications to centers maintained by outside companies instead of managing them in-house entails more than using different technologies. Health systems also must adapt the technology workforce to the new way.

Mount Sinai has given its data center workers the opportunity to transition to roles in cloud architecture, engineering and related areas, Myers said. And every employee in the system’s technology department is expected to take at least one Microsoft-led class on the cloud and at least one on cybersecurity.

Tufts Medicine started bringing applications live on Amazon’s cloud in April after more than a year of planning and preparation.

Download Modern Healthcare’s app to stay informed when industry news breaks.

During that time, Burlington, Massachusetts-based Tufts Medicine offered Amazon cloud training to employees who previously worked with on-site database administration, security or on IT applications that would move to the cloud. The aim was to enable those professionals to retain their jobs, just using Amazon Web Services tools instead of the older systems.

Tufts hired temporary workers and brought in consultants to fill data center positions so that full-time employees had time to be trained. “You have to support your team for them to succeed,” said Dr. Shafiq Rab, chief digital and information officer at Tufts Medicine.

Employees who completed training and earned certifications were placed in the health system’s cloud center of excellence. About 35 people work in the center, roughly 60% of whom previously worked on in-house data centers, Rab said.

Many of the new staffers were hired to work on Epic Systems electronic health records software, which is new to Tufts Medicine. Not all new employees had cloud training, Rab said. Tufts Medicine hired them based on “attitude” and “aptitude,” even if they still needed training, he said.

Not a Modern Healthcare subscriber? Sign up today.

Cloud skills are highly valued in the job market, so health systems should prepare to boost salaries to retain reskilled employees, said Joseph Williams, Seattle director of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

“In some cases, people work for a health system because they love the mission,” Williams said. “But at the same time, nobody wants to walk away from a better salary.”

Despite the risk that health systems will invest in retraining workers only to lose them to other employers, recruiting whole new teams to replace them would be at least as costly, he said.

A blended approach that combines retraining current employees who understand company culture and hiring workers already adept at the cloud could be the most effective, said Probal Hasan, a partner at technology consulting firm West Monroe. Health systems also should communicate whether they’ll be retraining data center staff early in the process so employees know how their jobs will change, he said.

Providence kicked off a cloud transition to Microsoft’s Azure in 2019. Like its counterparts, the Renton, Washington-based health system offered cloud training to employees who had managed or supported on-site data center infrastructure.

“One, we wanted to make sure we took care of our own caregivers,” said B.J. Moore, Providence’s chief information officer. “Second is just practicality: Azure, or any cloud skills, are rare.”

More than 20% of employees, who preferred the hands-on work in on-site data centers, declined the training program and retired or left for other jobs where those skills were still needed, Moore estimated.

Outside of cloud vendors themselves, the number of employers that need on-site data center professionals is dwindling, which threatens the careers of those accustomed to the old way of doing things, Moore said. “You don’t want to be the last person that is great at local data centers.”