Laying the Groundwork for Modernized Healthcare

Modernizing IT in healthcare isn’t just about upgrading infrastructure. It’s about creating faster, safer, more seamless experiences for patients and the staff who care for them. And for most health systems, that transformation starts in one place: the electronic health record (EHR).

This is the heartbeat of digital healthcare experiences. When it performs well, clinicians move faster, patients get answers sooner, and operational bottlenecks disappear. And when providers modernize the infrastructure behind the EHR, they often unlock the performance gains and savings needed to modernize everything else.

“Most providers begin the digital healthcare journey by modernizing their EHR infrastructure. Then they use the savings to update other critical systems like PACS,” explains Tony Nunes, Senior Manager, Healthcare and Life Sciences at AMD. “The ultimate goal is to free up enough budget to be able to invest in the latest AI solutions that can streamline processes like patient inductions, discharges, and clinical data entry. Capabilities like these are becoming essential for improving patient care and staff satisfaction.”

To meet rising EHR requirements and prepare for the next wave of digital healthcare initiatives, providers are turning to Cisco UCS servers powered by AMD EPYC processors. This pairing offers an ideal solution for providers that want to modernize infrastructure and accelerate the transition to digital healthcare.

The next examples illustrate how three healthcare providers are using Cisco UCS X-Series servers powered by AMD EPYC processors to address demanding EHR needs and become future-ready.

Medium-Sized Provider Is All-in on Cisco

This medium-sized healthcare provider operates nine hospitals, with specialties in cancer, heart care, and trauma services. In addition to supporting its own clinicians, the organization also serves as the EHR host for several smaller regional systems, bringing the total number of EHR users to nearly 20,000. Their environment runs EHR on-premises with disaster recovery in the AWS cloud, making reliability and performance essential.

As an established Cisco UCS customer, they already trusted the platform’s longevity and stability. After a less than satisfactory experience with competing servers, they were seeking reliability and consistency for critical workloads and the ability to future-proof the environment.

So they turned to Cisco UCS X-Series with 4th generation AMD EPYC processors for the next phase of EHR modernization. UCS X-Series delivered the power and cooling to support more powerful CPUs, enabled 100G end-to-end networking for faster throughput, and provided a modular design that gave them flexibility to support existing and future use cases.

The initial UCS X-Series deployment focused on accelerating database reporting. Based on guidance from their EHR provider, the IT team selected AMD EPYC processors for their high core counts and ability to support a large, high-performance memory footprint, both essential for their database-intensive workload.

In addition to Cisco UCS, this provider relies on a broad portfolio of Cisco technologies, including data center and campus networking, as well as a full suite of security solutions such as firewalls, Secure Client for endpoint protection, Cisco Duo for identity and access management, and Cisco Umbrella for cybersecurity. The organization also uses Cisco Contact Center to support its high volume of inbound calls.

The team sees the new UCS X-Series systems with AMD processors as an ideal fit. The initial deployment was so successful that they have already placed additional orders for UCS X-Series powered by the latest 5th generation AMD EPYC processors with 128GB DIMMs. These systems will support XenApp and VDI for the EHR presentation layer — workloads previously running on servers from another vendor.

Multi-state Healthcare Provider Relies on Cisco Intersight for Remote Management

With operations spread across six states, this large healthcare provider faced unique operational challenges. With its current EHR systems reaching end-of-support, UCS X-Series with AMD EPYC processors was an easy choice for EHR given the organization’s existing use of UCS X-Series and Intersight across other parts of its footprint. The UCS X-Series platform is easy to install and provides efficient power and cooling, while AMD EPYC CPUs offer significant density and performance advantages. In addition to Cisco UCS and Cisco Nexus for data center networking, the hospital also operates a storage area network (SAN) based on Cisco MDS to provide fast reliable storage to support the EHR.

Other computing platforms couldn’t match the management capabilities of Cisco Intersight. With operations in multiple states, Intersight gives this team centralized, remote control of infrastructure and automates provisioning, monitoring, and optimization of UCS systems. This helps enhance security and scalability. With Intersight, the provider can deploy infrastructure faster, improve performance, and centralize visibility. 

The new systems have significantly improved EHR performance and throughput, and the organization has been very satisfied with the results. Future AI workloads will potentially also leverage UCS X-Series with EPYC CPUs to handle AI inference.

Research Organization Chooses UCS X-Series for EHR, Plans Ahead for AI

This large U.S. healthcare provider and research institution faced a critical need to upgrade the IT infrastructure supporting its EHR system, as the software was running on systems reaching end-of-support. While it considered all available options, the organization ultimately selected Cisco UCS X-Series servers with AMD EPYC processors due to a strong preference for the operational simplicity, modularity and cloud-based management using Cisco Intersight.

Because of the unified design of Cisco UCS X-Series, cabling requirements were drastically reduced. What previously required about 20 cables for ten rack mount servers can now be managed with just two cables.

This team was particularly concerned about database performance for its EHR system. After a presentation from AMD, they were convinced that the processor density and performance of AMD EPYC CPUs was the best choice for their hospital system’s EHR needs, reducing total server count while decreasing processing time.

Achieving 100% uptime and resilience is paramount for mission-critical applications like EHR and radiology imaging (PACS). This team relies on a range of Cisco products to meet this operational objective. Cisco Secure Workload provides application-level visibility and micro-segmentation, and the hospital team also leverages Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) in conjunction with Medigate for visibility into IoT devices across the hospital system.

Adopting ACI for Resiliency

A key element of the IT architecture is a multi-site Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) deployment that provides fault isolation, geographic redundancy, and disaster recovery. Cisco ACI offers significant benefits for healthcare organizations, particularly in the areas of data security, application availability, and operational efficiency.

As a research organization, this healthcare provider already has internal teams developing AI-based applications. It views Cisco's X-Fabric—which will enable multiple GPUs to connect to one server within the UCS X-series chassis—as a "game changer" for its AI strategy going forward. With high core counts, massive memory bandwidth, low latency, and efficient multi-threaded performance, the EPYC CPUs deployed in its UCS X-Series platform excel in AI inference, while AMD Instinct™ MI300 GPUs are well suited to AI training with massive compute, high-bandwidth memory, optimized tensor cores, and scalable multi-GPU architectures.

Accelerating the Digital Healthcare Transition

For most healthcare providers, EHR software is on the critical path for the transition to digital healthcare. By choosing solutions from Cisco and AMD, healthcare organizations can deliver the performance and reliability that EHR and other critical software systems require today, while future-proofing their data centers to accommodate additional advanced workloads including AI.

“AMD EPYC processors enable healthcare data centers to become more efficient, maximizing operations while helping control energy costs and optimizing performance per system and rack,” says Jeremy Foster, SVP and General Manager, at Cisco. “The collaboration between Cisco and AMD will enable healthcare customers to utilize the newest technological innovations from Cisco and AMD to address EHR and other demanding computing needs.”