Murfreesboro Medical Clinic Gets a Clean Bill of Health in the Cloud

With Racksquared on its care team, the clinic improved its IT health and resiliency

Preventative Care Checkup

For more than 75 years, Murfreesboro Medical Clinic (MMC) has been providing healthcare to people in Middle Tennessee. The physician-owned clinic has eight locations, about 1,000 employees, and more than 20 specialties, including pediatrics, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, dermatology, and surgery.

A small-but-mighty IT team at MMC keeps the clinic’s technology healthy and up to date. That includes managing MMC’s electronic health records (EHR) system, its billing and payment systems, and other tech infrastructure that keeps the clinic running smoothly.

The clinic asked Jack Harris, its systems administrator, to diagnose the health of its business continuity and disaster recovery plan. MMC had an older IBM Power server onsite, and the team performed tape backups every night. He found that if something went wrong with the server, the clinic risked being down for up to 10 days waiting for new hardware

MMC needed a highly recommended specialist who could provide a solid treatment plan. So, the IT team did what people often do when they need a good octor: They started asking around. “We just openly asked,” said Jack. “Do you have any recovery plans, or which vendors are you using for cloud hosting? And we started hearing that Racksquared was great.”

In fact, Racksquared’s reputation for reliability is echoed by industry leaders like Athenahealth, MMC’s provider for patient management and medical billing. Athenahealth points to Racksquared as a trusted partner with a consistent track record of success across numerous implementations. They highlight the company’s unique ability to translate complex requirements into seamless, high-performing solutions for a wide range of organizations.

Building Immunity

Prior to working with Racksquared, the clinic used a single IBM Power9 server on-premises for athenaIDX, its medical billing and payments system, and the IT team ran a tape backup every night. If the server went down, repair and recovery could take several days, leaving the clinic unable to operate at maximum efficiency.

“We can’t afford to be down for 10 days while we’re waiting on hardware to arrive,” said Jack. “It would ultimately cost us more if that happened than we would ever spend migrating to the cloud with Racksquared.”

Still, some of MMC’s leaders were a bit nervous about a cloud migration. They were more comfortable having the data in-house and under direct control, as it had been for decades. Yet the question loomed: What would happen if the server went down? During this time, MMC had to reboot the server, and it took longer than expected to come back up. “It scared us a little,” Jack recalled. “But it also helped us know we were making the right decision to migrate.”

MMC ultimately reached out to Racksquared. They walked MMC through its infrastructure: two data centers with replicated storage and multiple levels of redundancy. The teams discussed recovery times, data handling, and exactly how Racksquared would keep MMC’s systems healthy and available. Additionally, MMC required its provider to be HIPAA-compliant, and Racksquared checked that box as well.

Healthy and Thriving

Since migrating to Racksquared, MMC’s systems are running as smoothly as ever. “It was pretty much a system that just ran and was stable, so nothing really changed there, which is a good thing,” Jack said. “Everything’s still running fine.

But there are a few upgrades. For example, if MMC’s main site goes down, staff at other locations can still access the system. The clinic also gained some flexibility that it didn’t have before. When some overnight tasks started running slower, Jack simply sent an email: “We’re experiencing some delays, can we add some memory and see if that helps?” The Racksquared team responded quickly, increasing the memory, without any effort from MMC or changes on its end.

Another major shot in the arm for MMC’s IT team was Racksquared’s expertise with AIX, the operating system on which the billing and patient management software runs. “We didn’t have any support with that before,” said Jack. After migrating this server to the cloud, MMC no longer has to worry about the headaches that come with a major outage. With Racksquared’s specialists on its team, the clinic is in an even stronger position to provide high-quality healthcare services to the people of Middle Tennessee.