Carle Health Transforms IT Infrastructure with Comet's Modern Work, Azure, and Security Solutions

Based in Urbana, IL, Carle Health is a vertically integrated system dedicated to being a trusted healthcare partner for the communities it serves. It has more than 16,800 employees in its hospitals, multispecialty physician groups and associated healthcare businesses including the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the world’s first engineering-based medical school, and Methodist College. Health AllianceTM is a leading provider-driven health plan serving Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Ohio and Washington, and FirstCarolinaCare health plan serves North Carolina.

The Carle Health Foundation
  • Healthcare
  • 35,000 employees
  • Urbana, IL
  • Technologies
GitHub for Enterprise, GitHub Advanced Security, Power Platform, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Terraform

Overview

Healthcare providers today face a critical challenge: modernizing their IT infrastructure to improve patient care and cut costs. Many struggle with aging systems locked away in datacenters, rigid processes that slow innovation, and difficulties finding and training staff with the skills needed to both support existing systems and help shift to new ones.

Carle Health, a major healthcare organization with 35,000 employees, is growing rapidly in an era where patient care demands have never been more challenging. Recognizing the need for change, Carle Health set an ambitious goal: Revamp operations and enhance healthcare delivery for patients and providers alike by adopting Microsoft Cloud technologies.

It's no small ask: Transform IT across the entire organization while minimizing disruptions to patient and provider experiences. To tackle this challenge, Carle Health partnered with Comet, a long-term partner that specializes in digital transformations using Microsoft technologies. Drawing on our expertise in Modern Work, Azure, and Security, we crafted a comprehensive plan to help Carle Health redefine healthcare for the digital era.

Our approach didn't just swap old systems for new ones. We reimagined how technology could work smarter for everyone at Carle Health - from IT staff to frontline healthcare providers. The result is a more agile, efficient Carle Health, better equipped to meet the demands of modern healthcare.

Challenge

Like many Healthcare organizations today, Carle Health is all too familiar increasingly complex care landscape and challenging economic conditions:

  • Preparing for an AI-First World: The transformational leadership team recognized the disruptive opportunity presented by AI. However, their existing solutions were insufficient to fully leverage these advancements. They needed an agile and robust IT infrastructure that would support AI initiatives and enable them to lead in their market.
  • Complex IT Ecosystem: The organization was burdened with a highly complex ecosystem of different technologies, vendors, integrations, and legacy constraints. This complexity made management challenging and hindered operational efficiency, making it difficult to innovate and scale effectively.
  • Urgent Need to Upskill Staff: To support and scale new AI-driven initiatives, there was an imperative to upskill staff, providers, and operational personnel rapidly. Ensuring that the workforce could adopt and leverage new technologies was crucial for the successful transformation of the organization.

Solution

Comet provided a series of holistic solutions that laid the foundation for success as the Carle IT teams executed their digital transformation vision:

  • Modern Work: Leveraged the world-class interoperability of Microsoft 365 to unify productivity tools, enhancing collaboration and communication across the organization.

  • Azure Infrastructure: Partnered together to transform it's existing Azure infrastructure through automation and governance for improved scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency.

  • DevOps/DevSecOps: Balanced speed with control through automation. New cutting-edge tech helped improve the collaboration between the Development, Cloud Ops, and Cybersecurity teams

  • Security: Strengthened their cloud security posture with advanced tooling, enabling DevSecOps and Cloud Security Posture Management practices, without sacrificing their developer velocity.

  • Technologies Deployed:

    • GitHub for Enterprise: Standardized governance, administration, development workflows and code repositories to accelerate developer productivity.
    • GitHub Advanced Security: State-of-the-art tooling that augments the cybersecurity teams and enables collaboration across Carle's SDLC.
    • Power Platform: Enabled rapid development of custom applications and automation of business processes.
    • Infrastructure as Code: Governance policies, CI/CD pipelines, platform and application workloads, all now provisioned using Terraform for consistent and repeatable deployments.

Results

Governance That Enables Scale

Implemented governance policies to support future scalability and sustain growth.

Over 5x ROI in Cost Savings

Significant reduction in licensing and operational expenses through consolidating existing 3rd party solutions on to the Microsoft stack.

Simplified Management

Streamlined IT operations with a unified platform, reducing complexity and overhead.

Enhanced Employee Experience

Improved tools and processes led to better performance and increased collaboration.

Conclusion: An Evolving Partnership

Our work with Carle Health marks not just a successful project, but an ongoing journey of improvement. Together, we've transformed their IT landscape and helped prepare them for a cloud-first, and AI-first world. And we're not stopping there.

This partnership goes beyond technology - it's about empowering healthcare providers and improving patient outcomes. Our work with Carle Health shows what's possible when innovative tech aligns with dedicated healthcare professionals.

Looking ahead, we're excited about the new challenges we'll tackle together. At Comet, we don't just address current issues - we help our partners shape future solutions.

"Its been a year since Comet was onsite and we all made the decision to prioritize dollars to governance and process improvement. I think it’s fair to say it has worked and it was the right decision. I wanted to take the time thank our internal team for coming together the way we did, our leadership team for going to bat for the dollars, and Comet for all the work they’ve done and their willingness to truly ingrain themselves with the team."

Taylor Craig
Director of Enterprise Digital Solutions of Carle Health