WellSpan Health cuts downtime from hours to minutes

Keeping up with a mission that keeps accelerating

WellSpan Health is an integrated health system serving central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. With a network of 12 hospitals, more than 250 patient care locations and 23,000 team members, WellSpan is dedicated to reimagining healthcare and transforming the communities it serves.

As WellSpan grew, its on-premises content environment required enhanced downtime coordination, server maintenance and operational oversight. Infrastructure upgrades placed clinical availability at risk, while a small IT team was constrained by routine maintenance instead of focusing on higher-value initiatives.

“The biggest change right now in healthcare is how everyone wants access to all of their documents at their fingertips,” WellSpan Health Application Architect Ryan Heathcote said. “Moving to the cloud and not having downtime as much was really the central point for us.” 

At the same time, regulatory and clinical expectations require near-continuous system availability and fast access to patient information — with no tolerance for data loss or extended outages.

“In healthcare, even small failure rates matter. You can’t afford lost access to information — whether it’s during an upgrade or a system outage,” Heathcote said.

Enterprise scope

As part of its modernization initiative, WellSpan wanted:

• An enterprise content management (ECM) platform supporting clinical and business operations
• Clinical content, including documents and images, integrated within Epic workflows
• Enterprise workflows across health information management (HIM), accounts payable (AP), HR and supply chain
• Shared governance, security and integrations across the enterprise

CIO objectives

For WellSpan’s CIO, success ultimately came down to four core objectives:

• Increase system availability and reduce downtime
• Eliminate the risks of on-premises infrastructure
• Maintain compliance across the enterprise
• Enable growth without adding IT headcount

Building a stronger foundation in the cloud with Hyland + AWS

WellSpan migrated OnBase to the Hyland Cloud — consolidating clinical and business content on a single, governed system while shifting responsibility for infrastructure, upgrades and availability to Hyland.

OnBase continues to support mission-critical workflows across the enterprise, including:

• Clinical document access directly within Epic
• HIM and compliance operations  
• AP and invoice processing
• HR records and workflows
• Supply chain documentation and integrations

The Hyland Cloud leverages AWS infrastructure to deliver:

• Multi-availability zone resilience for high availability
• Elastic scaling to support growth in content, users and integrations
• A distributed storage architecture for durability and performance
• Enterprise-grade security controls aligned with healthcare compliance requirements

“From the user perspective, nobody had to change how they worked,” WellSpan Senior Application Analyst Ray Markey said. “OnBase in Epic worked exactly the same — but from the IT side, the operational burden dropped significantly.”

Automation turns momentum into measurable impact

As WellSpan settles into its new cloud foundation, the real transformation becomes visible in the moments that matter most.

90%-plus reduction in planned downtime

WellSpan’s first major upgrade in the Hyland Cloud required only 30 minutes of downtime, compared to 6-8 hours previously. Predictable maintenance windows now coincide with off-peak clinical schedules.

Increased resilience and platform availability

“While hundreds of servers were down during a major IT disruption, OnBase in the Hyland Cloud just kept running,” Markey said.

Decreased operational risks and IT overhead

WellSpan has eliminated server patching, capacity planning and database maintenance. Doing so has reduced reliance on internal IT resources, and freed teams to focus on optimization, integrations and automation.

“Leaving infrastructure management in Hyland’s hands gave us the freedom to focus on improving workflows instead of fixing servers,” Markey said. 

Enterprise-wide efficiency

Clinicians now access content directly within Epic workflows, and back-office teams are automating complex processes using Hyland IDP. Also crucial: The health system can add new integrations without redesigning infrastructure.

“With Hyland Intelligent Document Processing, we can handle invoices and records exactly the way our organization needs — even where our ERP fell short,” Heathcote said.

Stronger governance and audit readiness

Partnering with Hyland has helped WellSpan:

• Centralize content with consistent access controls
• Accelerate audit responses and reduce compliance risks
• Improve confidence in data integrity

“If we ever get audited, having everything centralized makes it much easier to find exactly what’s needed and respond quickly,” Heathcote said.

Enhanced partnership and ongoing optimization

WellSpan attributes much of its momentum to Hyland’s teams and structured support model, which helped ensure smooth execution and continued optimization. “We partnered with Hyland to do the migration to the cloud, and that was honestly the best project we have done with them,” Heathcote said. Building on that success, WellSpan also engaged Hyland’s Technical Account Manager and Success Paths, resources Heathcote described as “a great addition to the support that was already available.”

A cloud foundation ready for what’s next

With its new cloud-based foundation in place, WellSpan is expanding automation across the enterprise. The health system is evaluating broader adoption of Hyland IDP to further reduce manual effort and improve data quality.

“We’re really excited about Hyland IDP. We’re really looking at streamlining our scanning and indexing, hoping we can centralize it even more,” Heathcote said.

The Content Innovation Cloud positions WellSpan to adopt additional intelligence and automation capabilities over time — while maintaining governance, performance and control.

“The Hyland Cloud has prepared us for the next generation of AI,” Heathcote said. “We’re already where we need to be to take advantage of what’s coming.”

Markey shares a complementary view: Aggregating content across repositories and bringing analysis tools to that unified layer opens new opportunities for insight and improvement. “It’s an opportunity to take documents from any repository, put it all in one place and use these valuable tools to really analyze what your content is,” he said.

As WellSpan’s mission continues to accelerate, the path forward is grounded in reliability, clarity and scale — keeping information close to the workflow today while creating room for tomorrow’s intelligence and efficiency.