Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) executive Mark Eimer explains how an ambitiously-timed rollout of a comprehensive suite of Google products helped the entire organization—from doctors to IT staff—achieve better security, cultivate a more equitable work environment, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

How does a recently merged, 17-hospital healthcare system fast-track a platform migration and hardware rollout securely and in a way that improves work for everyone, regardless of location or role? These are the questions that kept me up at night in early 2020, when the pandemic demanded a “big bang”—something our legacy laptops and operating systems couldn’t handle.

We began our work with Google in 2020 with the adoption of Chrome as our default browser. As we migrated platforms, keeping patient data safe was of the utmost importance to us, along with providing every staff member with the tools they needed to work virtually. Our staff often experienced issues accessing our web-based applications using Internet Explorer or Edge Browser, a problem that went away when we switched to Chrome. Chrome’s versatile compatibility also made it easier for my team to migrate all of our web-based operations, and Chrome’s security and manageability were key components to making this switch a huge win for the organization.

The success of this migration led us to extend our Google partnership to patient care applications—where Google’s expertise in AI and ML helps scale the use of diagnostics tools and improve other aspects of the patient journey.

Achieving security at every step 

Like so many other healthcare organizations, we’ve been concerned about ransomware attacks. This is part of why we moved to Google Workspace and distributed over 3,000 Chrome OS devices in kiosk mode in March of 2020, when many of us went remote due to the pandemic. We were very concerned about team members accessing corporate applications through home devices that were running EOL operating systems (WIN7), as well as a general lack of antivirus and encryption measures.

We were protected by the fact that Google’s software and hardware both had built-in security features that we needed to stave off sophisticated attackers. For example, Chrome OS automatically updates to the latest security update and encrypts data living outside the cloud on the hardware. These features protected us from security-related disruptions, letting us securely move a huge library of file shares and emails across thousands of accounts to Google Chrome OS in just four months.

A year later, in March 2021, we migrated the enterprise over to Google Workspace and saw an immediate reduction in spam by 30% from the inherent built-in AI/ML. This meant staff were less likely to receive (and click through) phishing attempts. My team could connect, create, and collaborate easily and securely—even as more of us were working from home and needed to access sensitive data remotely. 

Leveling the playing field

As an organization, we were surprised by how many team members didn’t have personal computers at home. We quickly decided that if we needed team members to work from home, the health network would have to supply hardware. Chromebooks’ lower price tag compared to PCs—on top of their built-in security controls—allowed us to purchase, deploy, and support that initial distribution of 3,000 Chromebooks to team members in less than three weeks, providing devices to every eligible remote employee instead of just a select few. This was vital to reaching our equitable technology goal as part of our diversity and inclusion initiative: everybody has the same tools to do good work.

When all employees have what they need to do their jobs well, we get better patient outcomes. Before we began this cloud adoption journey, patient and staff experiences were different within the hospitals and outside of them. 

Now it’s the same wherever our staff is, and we’ve seen efficiency and accessibility benefits extend to the patient side. For example, we built a web-based contact center that supports 80 locations that use Workspace and Chrome OS devices. Since customer service, admin, and providers are all on the same system, it has become a one-stop shop for patients.

Furthermore, through the Grow with Google program, we were able to provide another benefit to employees that drove our equity goals. Google trained 50 non-IT staff members—from environmental services, food and nutrition, and other non-tech areas who were interested in making a career change to IT—on the Google products we were using. They may not have thought about switching to a career in IT before the Grow with Google program came to our organization, but through this partnership, they now have that opportunity.

A strategic, long-term partner

With any large-scale rollout, the work doesn’t end once laptops are in employee hands. Google has shown their commitment to long-term collaboration as they continuously optimize their products for the unique needs of healthcare providers and go the extra mile in tailoring tools to our staff’s workflows. 

For example, on the Chrome OS side, the Google team has helped our registration desks and document centers with device integration for hardware like credit card readers and e-signature pads. They’ve also helped us meet security and privacy requirements mandated by state and federal governments around HIPAA, Medicaid, and Medicare reimbursements. Over this next year, we’ll look at a feature roadmap with Google Cloud to deliver further enhancements, iterating on the product itself to meet our needs for the present and the future.

Delivering the future of healthcare

The benefits we’ve seen around security and usability—and the ability to provide all staff with equal access to Google’s technology—are why we’re expanding our partnership with Google to both the administrative and clinical sides of HMH. In addition to further Google rollouts with corporate, next year we’re distributing Chromebooks to all 350 of our ambulatory clinics.

We’re also working with the Google professional services team to create a custom AI model that analyzes 3D mammogram images. This AI model will enable two providers to read mammograms—which adheres to international best practices but is currently rare in the US—without requiring additional time. Conducting double readings of mammograms will yield better health outcomes for our patients, such as a lower patient recall rate and an increased accuracy in detecting breast cancer.

We’re currently building the model using a variety of Google Cloud products, including Cloud Healthcare API. Once complete, this model is expected to be trained, deployed, and maintained in Google’s Vertex AI, allowing our providers to be more productive as they make clinical decisions with AI support. As the model is proven over time, we plan to make the predictive services accessible to other healthcare organizations.

With Google, we’re able to achieve a unified architecture for storing data as well as training and deploying AI models, which enable our staff to work more efficiently and securely from anywhere. While I may not be able to predict the future as accurately as AI can, I foresee our continued partnership with Google as a key part of HMH’s improved provider and patient outcomes.

As an enterprise admin, when you choose to use Google Cloud Private Catalog to enable curated, self-serve Google Cloud infrastructure provisioning, you need the ability to manage your organization’s deployments. Today, we’re pleased to announce support for several improvements to Terraform driven deployments through Private Catalog. 

With this new release, you can update Terraform configurations and keep your end users informed about updates. At the same time, Private Catalog users have the ability to view new updates, note version highlights and then update the deployment. This gives you greater control over managing deployments for solutions provisioned through Private Catalog and ensuring compliance with organizational policies and standards.

Let’s take a closer look at the features you’ll find in this release. 

Deployment change management

Terraform solutions use Cloud Storage’s Object Versioning to manage updates to configuration files. With this release, you may update configuration files using multiple approaches.

• Update the solution’s Cloud Storage object with a new configuration version
• Use a different Cloud Storage object that contains a new configuration file

Once you view and apply the changes to the solution in a Private Catalog, end users are immediately able to consume the new version of the deployment configuration.

Additionally, prior to applying any changes, you can evaluate the contents of an update by comparing versions to download and compare the current and latest versions of the configuration and use new version highlights to add a description about the updates.

Ease of consumption

Once Private Catalog detects a change to the deployment configuration, it automatically informs catalog users about the change. On the Solutions page, end users have the ability to:

• Get informed about solutions that have updates
• View version highlights published by the admin
• Apply the new version 

Additionally, with this release, Catalog users can retry existing deployments by modifying deployment parameters.

Reporting improvements

The deployment reporting dashboards for Private Catalog-based deployments now show additional information about the version of a solution deployed. This enables deeper insights into the overall deployment status across all Private Catalog solution assets.

Get started today

These new features are available to all Private Catalog customers. To learn how to use these features, refer to our documentation:

• Create a Terraform configuration in Private Catalog
• Manage and update your Terraform configurations in Private Catalog

Accelerating digital transformation

Digital transformation is what propels businesses and industries forward. Organizations of all sizes—from startups to global enterprises—focus on digital transformation not only to make scaled improvements, but also to drive significant change and fully embrace the digital age. The pandemic has jump started and pushed many organizations into full gear to digitize their business models and transform with increased business agility, resiliency, and velocity, while driving new innovation and business values for the customers.

However, according to the Boston Consulting Group, only about 30% of companies navigate a digital transformation successfully. Many large scale digital transformation programs failed because of lack of clear business priorities, top-down executive sponsorship, or dedicated resources and commitment to see it through.

Laying the foundation for digital transformation success

Digital transformation drives foundational change in how an organization operates, optimizes internal resources, and delivers value to customers; however, this doesn’t just happen overnight. Digital transformation requires a programmatic approach through an incremental yet agile, cost-effective, value-driven, and sustainable strategy to drive successful transformation across the organization.

One of the critical factors foundational to success is Cloud FinOps (Cloud Financial Operations). Cloud FinOps is an operational framework and cultural shift that brings technology, finance, and business together to drive financial accountability and accelerate business value realization through cloud transformation. In the context of Digital Transformation, it requires new ways of working and operating models to drive behaviors and cultural change that foster cross-functional collaboration, drive accountability, provide greater cost transparency, and promote a blameless culture.

Most importantly, Cloud FinOps serves as an enabling function to drive successful digital transformation programs and enable business agility by breaking down the boundaries between technology, finance, and business teams. Through this cross-functional team collaboration, technology leaders partner with finance and business leaders to better understand the technology investments to create sustainable business outcomes. By doing so, business priorities become more clear and the focus shifts to value creation, customer-centricity, and innovation.

As such, companies are reinventing their business models to fund value streams and connect cloud technology investments to strategic business outcomes. With the increased visibility of the cloud costs, finance teams are also gaining greater accuracy in tracking cloud spend against budgets. Organizations can align the TCO of the technology services to the value metrics to make better informed future investment decisions and forecast demand.

Cloud FinOps to accelerate business value realization

The successful deployment and implementation of Cloud FinOps building blocks will enable organizations to accelerate digital transformation beyond cost savings, including the ability to:

• Accelerate business value realization and innovation
• Drive financial accountability and visibility
• Optimize cloud usage and cost efficiency
• Enable cross organizational trust and collaboration
• Prevent cloud spend sprawl
• Break down of departmental silos

Organizations that are successful in digital transformation most often have established processes to measure and track business value. One of the key building blocks of Cloud FinOps is “Measurement & Realization.” By establishing a robust value measurement approach to track and monitor the business value metrics toward business goals, we are bringing technology, finance, and business leaders together through the discipline of Cloud FinOps to show how digital transformation is enabling the organization to create new innovative capabilities and generate top-line revenue.

Business value metrics fall across several factors: cost efficiency, resiliency, velocity, innovation, and sustainability. We suggest assigning KPIs to the following metric categories:

Cost efficiency: Measure cost efficiency through infrastructure savings, migration, and support costs. Customers will commonly start with metrics such as cost of compute and storage per day-week-month, and evolve to unit metrics such as cost per customer served or cost per transaction, where the cost of an application stack is aligned to customer drivers.

Resiliency: Enhance operational resiliency with improvement in service quality and security risk posture. Traditional measures such as system service level and the frequency and duration of critical downtime events are effective measures of IT durability. Customers can also augment these metrics by associating a cost per minute of downtime events, reflecting not only the direct impact of these events but opportunity costs as well.

Velocity: Decrease time to market by accelerating fluidity in product and service delivery. By moving to a cloud-based microservices architecture, customers commonly achieve benefits of increasing software release frequency, as well as being able to run many more test scenarios prior to release, resulting in higher quality code. As an example, our recent Google’s State of DevOps Report 2021, shows that elite performers have 973x more frequent code deployment and release frequency than the low performers.

Innovation: Enable a culture of rapid experimentation to drive innovation and cloud transformation. With cloud technology, companies can avoid the financial constraints of fixed cost investments and lengthy procurement lead times. As a result, the marginal cost of experimentation and time from ideation to experimentation can drop significantly while the number of experiments per unit of time can grow dramatically.

Sustainability: Embed true environmental and social sustainability metrics across the organization by adopting a circular economy strategy and building sustainability into everything we do – from running applications on zero net emissions virtual machines to reducing carbon footprint with enhanced productivity and collaboration services. According to Accenture, companies with average on-premise to cloud migrations can drive 65% energy reduction and carbon emission reduction of 84%1.

Getting started

The Cloud FinOps journey starts with defining or updating your metrics. Since business goals and strategic imperatives will likely change over time, it is important to review the Cloud FinOps metrics whenever the goals change. The review of metrics should include the changes in business goals when there are changes in the internal priorities of the team. Executive leaders need to identify dependency relationships between technology and business outcomes to improve the impact of metrics on decision making and to better prioritize and invest in evolving business and technology capabilities. Defining good metrics is not just about aligning to business goals and demonstrating value. It is also important to help prioritize strategic initiatives, guide effective resource allocation, and generate awareness across the organization to drive a shift in mindset with the new way of operating in the cloud.

The pandemic has accelerated the need for companies to modernize their digital capabilities. With technology-driven disruptions across all industries, it has never been more important for organizations to transform themselves, embrace an agile mindset, and make bold investments in cloud technology and capabilities to achieve sustainable business outcomes.

So, where are you now in your cloud FinOps journey, and how do you move beyond the challenges ahead? Google can help you start the conversation and accelerate your path to maximizing business value with the cloud.

No matter where you are on the cloud transformation journey, through an interactive session with Google, we can bring executives across the organization together to work toward a shared vision and a plan to accelerate and realize business value in the cloud. If you are interested in more information, please contact us.

Special thanks to Pathik Sharma, Bruce Warner, Jon Naseath, and Nihar Jhawar for their contributions and sharing their domain expertise to this important Cloud FinOps topic.