OVERVIEW

The California Mental Health Services Authority (CalMHSA) is a Joint Powers of Authority (JPA) formed in 2009 by counties throughout the state to work on collaborative, multi-county projects that improve behavioral health care for all Californians.

CalMHSA contacted databasable in 2022 to discuss how they could host their Mirth Connect environment in the AWS cloud, which is something that databasable has done countless times in the past for other clients.

Mirth Connect is a cross-platform interface engine used in the healthcare industry that enables the management of information using bi-directional sending of many types of messages.

CHALLENGE

CalMHSA wanted to host their Mirth Connect in the AWS cloud to provide flexibility, high availability, cost efficiency, and most importantly HIPAA compliance.

The critical objectives of the project were to:

• Ensure strict HIPAA compliance with heightened security measures
• Create a cost efficient environment that doesn’t compromise on performance
• Guarantee uninterrupted service with robust disaster recovery
• Provide ability to accept and process messages in a secure manner
• Build an environment that can be enhanced with additional applications in the future

KEYS TO SUCCESS

Ensuring the safeguarding of the sensitive data housed by CalMHSA was of paramount importance to us. Therefore, we prioritized the implementation of robust security measures to ensure HIPAA compliance as the bedrock of the project. AWS offers a comprehensive suite of tools that facilitate adherence to HIPAA regulations, thus significantly fortifying the CalMHSA cloud-based infrastructure’s security.

Furthermore, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is consistently incorporating innovative security, auditing, and logging features, such as AWS GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub, which augment the security of the cloud infrastructure. Not to mention that encryption is easily enabled throughout the environment both in-transit and at-rest.

We were able to create a lean, low maintenance, and cost efficient architecture in AWS to house the CalMHSA environment using services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon EFS, and AWS Transfer Family.

AWS also provides the ability to resize infrastructure on the fly, so CalMHSA can easily manage capacity and application performance as required and taking advantage of the various AWS cost-saving schemes, enabled CalMHSA to significantly reduce their overall expenses.

AWS offers a highly resilient networking infrastructure through its multi-region, multi-AZ approach, ensuring robust availability. CalMHSA has successfully leveraged this capability through the utilization of AWS services such as AWS Backup, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon S3, resulting in fast, reliable disaster recovery capabilities.

The CalMHSA AWS network has been created to allow for easy expansion and the nature of cloud computing means that new applications and functionality can be seamlessly and securely added with minimal fuss.

SUMMARY

Migration to the AWS cloud has allowed CalMHSA to create a lean, cost efficient, highly secure, highly available, and flexible environment in a fraction of the time that an on-premise datacenter could do.

Get in touch with databasable now for expert guidance on migrating your Mirth Connect environment to the AWS cloud!