Customer Snapshot
Legacy Health, a large nonprofit health system serving 2.5 million people in Oregon and Washington state, needed to execute a once-in-a-generation reboot of the infrastructure supporting its electronic health record (EHR) platform and operational database (ODB).
The Challenge
The Legacy Health team, while very skilled, is not large. Given the migration’s complexity and the high stakes involved, it was essential to ensure tight alignment among all teams. Outside help with project management (PM) would be needed to achieve the best result.
The Solution
Legacy Health turned to Structured’s Project Management Office, and one project manager in particular, for much-needed PM to ensure the vital work with its critical dependencies and high visibility stayed on time and task. The results exceeded expectations and delivered a huge win for the healthcare system.
Planning for Healthy Outcomes
When ripples from Broadcom’s VMware acquisition in late 2023 grew into an unfortunate wave of price increases for Legacy Health’s licenses and support, the IS Infrastructure team at the health system jumped into action.
Legacy Health initiated a broad internal review of alternative virtualization solutions that could provide similar or better performance, greater flexibility, and improved economics for the environment supporting its EHR system and ODB.
The process began with a series of strategic planning sessions to align goals — primarily cost savings, performance improvements and long-term supportability. Once aligned, the organization initiated a formal proof of concept (POC) with collaboration between the hypervisor and EHR vendors.
The success of the POC and the strength of the new vendor partnerships were key in driving consensus and moving the project forward. The solution included a full-stack deployment of the new hypervisor across multiple data centers, integrated with Legacy Health’s existing storage and network infrastructure.
The Challenge:
Tight Timelines Require Experienced Talent
The migration of any hospital system’s hypervisor infrastructure supporting its EHR platform’s ODB is a task fraught with technical, operational and regulatory challenges. The IS Infrastructure team at Legacy Health, while exceedingly talented, was not well-staffed enough to effectively manage large and cross-functional internal and external teams for a project with this importance and magnitude. Outside expertise was needed.
The Solution:
PM Provides a Shot in the Arm
To ensure the necessary oversight of a project of this size, Legacy Health IS Infrastructure Engineering Director Jon Edwards turned to the deeply experienced Project Management Office (PMO) at Structured — and to one project manager in particular, Monika Otting.
With more than 20 years’ experience in customer service, operations and management, Otting brought the perfect mix of experience, organization, humanity and inquisitiveness to this project.
A Deft Touch
Under Otting’s coordination, a dedicated team of highly skilled engineers and IT leaders from multiple companies with expertise in virtualization, EHR systems, networking and storage pulled together in relative harmony in a carefully calculated and choreographed project. With 15 to 20 people attending each weekly project meeting, it could be challenging to make sure each viewpoint was heard, understood, and dealt with for the project’s benefit. It took a deft touch, but Otting credits the professionalism of the larger team. “Everyone was super invested in this project’s success and worked well together,” she said.
Against the Clock
The implementation was staged over eight weeks and followed a tightly managed plan to reduce risk. “We didn’t just run fast, we sprinted,” said Edwards.
Legacy Health began by migrating non-production workloads to the new hypervisor environment to test performance, identify any configuration challenges, and fine-tune system integration points. Once those systems were running smoothly, they expanded testing to include the full EHR stack in a sandbox environment, validating application performance, data integrity, and user experience. After successful validation, they executed a comprehensive migration plan for production systems. The final cutover to the new environment was conducted during a carefully planned maintenance window, with contingency plans and rollback procedures in place.
“Worth their weight in gold”
“A project manager with a soothing voice who can keep people on track is worth their weight in gold. I’m always grateful for the work Structured does.”- Jon Edwards, IS Infrastructure Engineering Director, Legacy Health
Conclusion:
Groundbreaking Possibilities
Despite the complexity, the transition was executed seamlessly, and the results exceeded expectations. Neither patients nor providers reported any negative impacts.
This success story highlights how project managers serve as the linchpin between technical teams, clinical staff and executive leadership. Their ability to coordinate cross-functional teams, manage resources, and maintain alignment with organizational goals is essential to minimizing downtime and ensuring data integrity during such migrations. In healthcare, where system availability and data accuracy can directly impact patient outcomes, the value of structured project oversight – and Structured project oversight! – cannot be overstated.
The project delivered significant business value, both in cost savings and operational performance — key metrics for a nonprofit, six-hospital health system with more than 70 primary care, specialty and urgent care clinics, 14,000 employees and nearly 3000 healthcare providers.
By eliminating VMware licensing, Legacy Health dramatically reduced its virtualization-related expenses, redirecting those budget dollars toward strategic IT initiatives. Beyond financial gains, the health system also realized notable performance improvements of its EHR. Users across clinical and administrative roles reported faster application response times and improved reliability almost instantly after the cutover. Perhaps most significantly, the successful implementation has demonstrated to other healthcare organizations that it is possible to run mission-critical workloads on alternative virtualization platforms, potentially reshaping the broader industry’s view of what is possible – and practical – outside of a VMware-centric world.
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