WellSpan Completes AWS Migration to Power AI Across 300 Clinical Applications

WellSpan Health has completed the migration of its technology portfolio to Amazon Web Services (AWS), moving more than 300 clinical applications and 7.5 petabytes of clinical and non-clinical data to the cloud in a project the health system said was completed in 17 weeks.

The transition includes WellSpan's full Epic electronic medical record (EMR) environment and marks the organization's move away from a data center-based infrastructure. The health system said the migration establishes a unified data foundation for deploying artificial intelligence (AI) across its operations, including medicine, nursing, cardiology, pharmacy, and supply chain.

The announcement marks the completion of a cloud transformation initiative WellSpan first unveiled in January, when it partnered with AWS to modernize its technology infrastructure and prepare for broader AI adoption.

"The milestone is not the end of a technology project, but rather the cornerstone of our next phase of innovation," Roxanna Gapstur, PhD, RN, President and CEO of WellSpan Health, said in the announcement. "The cloud will serve as the critical element to help us deliver on our commitments to our teams and our patients."

Migration Moves Beyond Infrastructure

Rather than treating the cloud migration as the finish line, WellSpan said it has already entered a second phase focused on replacing legacy architecture with native AWS services designed for AI workloads.

According to the health system, consolidating previously separate clinical and operational data into a standardized cloud environment allows AI applications to work across a broader set of patient and operational information. The platform now brings together structured and unstructured clinical notes, multimodal imaging data, administrative records, and operational systems that previously existed in separate environments.

WellSpan said the new environment supports AI deployments across its patient population of approximately 1.2 million people while reducing the engineering effort required to prepare data for analytics and machine learning.

The announcement reflects a broader trend across healthcare organizations that are investing in AI-ready infrastructure before scaling production AI systems. Similar investments are emerging across the sector, including Bristol Myers Squibb's decision to build an AI factory around NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform for research workloads.

Focus Shifts to AI Deployment

WellSpan said the migration enables its clinical and engineering teams to focus on deploying AI tools that accelerate diagnostic workflows, reduce administrative work, and return more clinician time to patient care.

"We have moved from a fragmented technology environment to a unified platform that our clinical and operational teams can build on immediately," Kasey Paulus, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at WellSpan Health, said. "The pace of what WellSpan will be able to deliver from here is fundamentally different."

AWS described the migration as creating a cloud environment optimized for healthcare AI. "The data foundation WellSpan has built with AWS is optimized for AI from the ground up," Allyson Fryhoff, Managing Director of Global Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS, said in the announcement.

Healthcare providers are increasingly pairing cloud modernization with enterprise AI initiatives as organizations move beyond pilot projects and prepare production systems capable of supporting clinical and operational workloads. 

The announcement also illustrates an enterprise technology shift in which cloud migration is increasingly viewed as the prerequisite for large-scale AI deployment rather than an end goal. Organizations across industries have been redesigning infrastructure to support AI-native workloads, reflecting a transition from modernizing IT systems to building platforms intended to support continuous AI development and deployment.