WellSpan Health has completed a large-scale migration of its technology infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), moving more than 300 applications and 7.5 petabytes of clinical and administrative data from on-premises data centers to the cloud.

The York, Pennsylvania-based health system said the project included its Epic electronic medical record environment and was completed in 17 weeks. The migration marks the end of WellSpan's use of a traditional data center model and begins a second phase focused on adopting native AWS services.

According to the health system, the migration consolidates data from clinical and operational systems, including medicine, nursing, cardiology, pharmacy and supply chain, into a standardized cloud environment. WellSpan said the new infrastructure is intended to support broader use of artificial intelligence by making structured and unstructured data, including clinical notes, imaging data sets and administrative records, more accessible for analysis.
WellSpan operates 12 hospitals, more than 250 care locations and employs approximately 23,000 people across Central Pennsylvania and Northern Maryland.

"This milestone is not the end of a technology project, but rather the cornerstone of our next phase of innovation," said Roxanna Gapstur, Ph.D., R.N., president and CEO of WellSpan Health. "The cloud will serve as the critical element to help us deliver on our commitments to our teams and our patients."

The second phase of the project will focus on replacing legacy technology with AWS-native services designed to support cloud-based applications and AI workloads.

AWS also characterized the project as a significant cloud migration for a regional health system. "The data foundation WellSpan has built with AWS is optimized for AI from the ground up," said Allyson Fryhoff, managing director of global healthcare and life sciences at AWS.

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