Cloud-Based Electronic Health Records System for Multi-Specialty Clinic Group

CareWell Medical Group operated 8 specialty clinics (cardiology, orthopedics, pediatrics, dermatology, oncology, neurology, gastroenterology, and internal medicine) using five different legacy EHR systems. This fragmentation created serious challenges: patient records were duplicated across systems, lab results took 2-3 days to share between departments, and providers lacked a unified view of patient history, leading to medication errors and redundant testing.

The legacy systems were expensive to maintain (costing $450K annually in licensing and support), lacked mobile access, and could not support modern interoperability standards like FHIR. Staff spent an average of 45 minutes per day manually reconciling patient data across systems. The organization needed a modern, cloud-based EHR solution that would unify all clinics while maintaining specialty-specific workflows and meeting stringent HIPAA and ONC certification requirements.

We conducted a comprehensive 6-week assessment of all existing systems, interviewing 50 providers and 35 administrative staff across specialties to document workflows, identify pain points, and define specialty-specific requirements. This research revealed 23 unique clinical workflows that needed to be preserved or improved in the new system.

We selected a cloud-based EHR platform and customized it to support each specialty's unique needs. The system was built on AWS using HIPAA-compliant infrastructure with multi-region redundancy. We developed custom modules for specialty-specific templates (cardiology echo reports, orthopedic surgical notes, oncology treatment plans) while maintaining a unified patient record accessible across all clinics.

Data migration was executed in phases over 4 months, beginning with the pediatrics clinic as a pilot. We developed automated ETL pipelines to extract, transform, and deduplicate 850,000 patient records from the legacy systems, achieving 99.7% data accuracy through validation scripts and manual QA review. Each clinic went live on a staggered schedule, allowing lessons learned from earlier deployments to improve subsequent rollouts.

The new EHR system unified patient records across all specialty clinics, eliminating duplicate entries and improving care coordination. Clinical staff reported 40% time savings on administrative tasks, allowing more time for patient care. The system achieved 99.98% uptime in its first year and successfully passed ONC certification for meaningful use requirements.