Jon Edwards wants IT to be invisible for healthcare patients. He wants all the infrastructure, applications and data to seamlessly deliver what care givers need.
“The measure of success, from my perspective, is that patients never know that we exist,” said Edwards, director of infrastructure engineering for Legacy Health, the largest nonprofit healthcare system in Oregon.
“It’s like roller derby. There are seven referees on the track, and the worst thing that can happen is if people are talking about the refs and not the athletes. Your job is to facilitate, and no one should remember who you are when the buzzer goes off.”
Curtis Stoecklin, IT platform manager for Legacy Health, said his team “works backward” from the aim of allowing doctors and nurses to spend more time with patients.
“Anything I can do that allows a provider to look into the eyes of the patient who is in front of them and really listen. That’s what matters,” Stoecklin said.
Not long ago, Legacy’s three-tier datacenter infrastructure made it difficult for Edwards, Stoecklin, and their teams to seamlessly work in the background. A simple operating system upgrade was a “nail-biting” ordeal that took up to 16 hours; management burdens meant that IT professionals didn’t have the time they needed to build custom applications to support care teams; and any changes to hardware risked affecting the resiliency of critical systems.
This complexity drove Legacy Health toward Nutanix five years ago. They were drawn by the promise of simplicity and stability.
“Now Nutanix is now the base for expanding to new services,” Edwards told The Forecast.
In healthcare, of course, the stakes are much higher than a blown call on a roller derby track or even the significant bottom-line hits that organizations in other industries might suffer if IT systems go offline. Edwards said his team’s “number-one and only” goal is to support the doctors and nurses providing lifesaving medical care.
“We can’t fail, because we can’t let them fail,” Edwards said. “If they fail, they are unable to provide care. It’s not about the budget or the bottom line. These are people’s lives.”
A Critical Decision
Before the Nutanix migration, Stoecklin noted, Legacy’s three-tier infrastructure - which was supporting a seven-hospital system - wasn’t just needlessly complex. The system’s needs were also rapidly growing in ways that the infrastructure was not prepared to handle. With an IT infrastructure shop of around 70 employees to support 14,000 workers, Legacy needed a solution that offered low-touch, reliable performance.
“We had networking that was separate from our storage, which was separate from our compute,” Stoecklin said. “That posed a number of challenges, especially as those systems aged and as needs changed. Applications get faster. All of a sudden, we were sending 3D images instead of flat images. The infrastructure simply wasn’t able to keep up.”
Legacy opted for Nutanix after considering a number of potential solutions. Not many vendors have hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) offerings, Stoecklin noted, and some of the other companies that Legacy considered have since stopped producing HCI altogether.
“These companies kind of dipped their toes into hyperconverged, and not everybody was serious about it,” Stoecklin said.
Legacy ultimately deployed the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure HCI solution, with its Nutanix AOS software stack and Prism Central multi-cluster manager, to create a single, streamlined platform for managing workloads and infrastructure across the system’s hospitals and clinics.
When the Legacy Health IT team looked at the cost to run a virtual machine on different platforms, Nutanix came out on top, especially for the predictable workloads of a healthcare organization. But Edwards said he was also drawn to Nutanix’s track record of innovation, as well as the candor of the company’s sales and support teams.
“Nutanix has not been sitting on its laurels,” Edwards said. “Nutanix has been hungry, showing up in conversations not only telling us what the product is capable of doing, but more importantly telling us what the product can’t do.”
The Nutanix decision, Edwards said, looks even better with the passage of time.
“When VMware became part of Broadcom, Broadcom continued to execute on their business model, and a lot of people chose to sit back,” he said.
Between September 2023 and March 2024, his team quickly pivoted from “We can’t to we will and we did, supplanting the dominant product with a vendor we can really trust like Nutanix.”
He said his team and Nutanix got on the same page and moved in the same direction quickly.
“For us, the timing was perfect. Nutanix took its commitment to building a better product for customers at the right time, and the company has stepped in to do battle on that field.”
Time Saved, Time to Build
The move to Nutanix has saved Legacy approximately 80 hours per month per medical center in maintenance time, according to Edwards. He and Stoeklin explained how the main data center required 300 fewer hours devoted to patching each month.
“I’m updating an OS in a single package,” Stoecklin said. “It’s no longer a 16-hour ordeal, where we’re wondering if it’s going to work or not. It’s a very seamless process, with a lot of safety checks built in. It’s fantastic.”
That simplicity has given Legacy’s IT teams time back to focus on developing in-house applications.
“We’re developing our own tools, which is probably rare in healthcare,” Stoecklin noted.
“I don’t think many teams do that, but we are a nonprofit system, and all of our dollars matter. We look really closely at whether it’s worth buying something off-the-shelf, or if we have the expertise to actually build our own tools.”
Prior to his time at Legacy, Stoecklin worked in sectors ranging from manufacturing to software development.
“This is my first time in healthcare. I love it,” he said. “But it’s a much different animal here in healthcare, with what you can do and what tools you have. For us, Nutanix is that tool. It allows us to do more—to focus on our CI/CD pipeline, to create new software, to ultimately make healthcare better.”
Edwards’s own career spans industries including energy, construction, financial services, and philanthropy.
“There is still a bit of a mindset that permeates IT in general, which is that if you automate too much, you’ll automate yourself out of a job,” he said. “But no. If you automate your menial tasks, you have more time to do cool things. That allows our small-but-mighty engineering team to do things that other IT organizations might be reluctant to do.”
A Foundation for the Future
With a streamlined, scalable infrastructure in place, Legacy’s IT leaders are confident they’ll be ready to tackle whatever challenges the future brings.
“From a platform perspective, I feel comfortable with our ability to scale,” Stoecklin said.
“There’s no constraint on how big or fast we can grow right now. So, if out of the blue, I find out we’re going to acquire another hospital? That’s not a problem. We want to put a thousand more users onto our Electronic Health Record (EHR) database? It’s not a problem. These limitations that keep other platform managers up at night, I don’t have to think about them anymore.”
“Now with a couple of good stories, I hope we can make more of these improvements in other spaces in ways that change patients lives for the better,” said Stoecklin.
Edwards noted that technology is advancing “at lightspeed.” And healthcare, he said, is reaching a moment where users will no longer tolerate brittle, fragile systems.
“We need to start pushing technology providers to focus on evolving everything holistically, so we can move forward with them,” said Edwards.
Edwards said that Legacy will “inevitably” incorporate more AI solutions in the years ahead, but leaders are taking a cautious and deliberate approach, especially regarding the protection of patient information.
“It’s something that we will do in lockstep with our information security teams,” he said. “We want to make sure that when we do it, it’s sustainable, it’s incremental, and people understand the value. That’s going to be a much longer journey.”
Editor’s note: Read the case study – Legacy Health Transforms Patient Care and IT Efficiency with Nutanix.
Calvin Hennick is a contributing writer. His work appears in BizTech, Engineering Inc., The Boston Globe Magazine and elsewhere. He is also the author of Once More to the Rodeo: A Memoir. Follow him @CalvinHennick.
Ken Kaplan contributed to this story.
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