Healthcare IT sales professionals often ask IT leaders in provider organizations, “What keeps you up at night?” It’s a tried and proven method of engaging in a meaningful sales conversation. And it will come as no surprise that one of the most common responses is: “Too many project requests and not enough resources and budget to deliver.”

Having spent 20-plus years in the provider space, I’m keenly aware that IT is often seen as an obstacle and not a business enabler. Clinical and business units are looking to IT to accelerate and automate the delivery of their respective services. What a novel idea! Automation allows everyone—including IT—to deliver more with less.

DevOps represents a change in IT culture. It removes barriers between siloed application and technical teams and automates processes that have been historically manual and slow. Data backups, restores, and refreshes for Epic environments are complex and time consuming for Epic database administrators. Adding to the challenge is the fact that experienced Epic database administrators are in high demand and short supply. One excellent use case for DevOps in healthcare is the use of Ansible for automating data management tasks in the Epic electronic medical record (EMR) environment.

Refresh and cloning activities are necessary to support build, master train, and playground environments in an Epic environment. There can be as many as 30 copies of the production environment in any given Epic EMR environment. Organizations attempt to automate these refresh and cloning tasks by writing custom scripts. These unsupported manual scripts can jeopardize Epic honor roll status and put your organization at risk of unplanned Epic downtime.

Only NetApp can deliver purpose-built automation for your Epic environment regardless of location—on premises or in the cloud. NetApp^® solutions eliminate the demand and risk associated with your staff doing the automation work. Because Epic analysts, trainers, and clinical informaticists have the right data, at the right time, in the right place they can deliver training to new employees, and they can develop new modules and application functionality requested by your Epic users.

Automation and configuration management are indispensable to an efficient DevOps-driven environment. NetApp supports Ansible modules for NetApp ONTAP^® and NetApp Element^® software, and we’re now offering an Epic data management automation solution that can reduce Epic backup and refresh times from hours to minutes. Our solution also eliminates risk and simplifies the delivery and management of Epic with Red Hat Ansible Automation platform.

Or register for the upcoming Dec 2^nd webinar presentation “The Value of Epic on NetApp”

Find out more about how NetApp can help automate and simplify data management with Ansible automation that’s customized for your Epic NetApp environment by contacting the NetApp Global Healthcare team.