Dell Medical School Partners with Rackspace for Cloud-Native Infrastructure

Dell Medical School has partnered with Rackspace Technology to become the first academic medical center to eliminate traditional data centers and rely solely on cloud services. Rackspace will manage Dell Med's Epic Electronic Health Record system and provide secure, compliant cloud services to ensure patient safety and system resilience. This partnership positions Rackspace to drive modernization across the healthcare industry and highlights its potential for expansion in the highly regulated sector.

Austin, TX - Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin (Dell Med) has announced a strategic partnership with Rackspace Technology (NASDAQ: RXT) to become the first academic medical center to eliminate traditional data centers and rely solely on cloud services [1][2]. This transformative move aims to enhance healthcare service delivery, medical education, and research.

Rackspace will manage Dell Med's Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) system and provide secure, compliant cloud services to ensure patient safety and system resilience. The partnership marks a significant shift in healthcare IT infrastructure, as Dell Med plans to build a new academic medical center without traditional physical data centers [1][2].

Michael Ryan, CIO and Chief Administrative Officer at Dell Med, highlighted the importance of the partnership: "Partnering with Rackspace for our hosted data center needs is crucial to our continued success, and the Epic deployment will be one of the first big steps in our joint journey forward" [1].

The collaboration will also enable Dell Med to leverage Rackspace's expertise in Epic deployments, which are critical due to the complex regulatory requirements and mission-critical nature of healthcare data [2]. This partnership positions Rackspace to demonstrate its capabilities in the highly regulated healthcare IT sector, which has traditionally been conservative in cloud adoption.

For Rackspace, this represents potential expansion in the healthcare vertical, one of the largest IT spending sectors in the economy. The fully managed service model for Dell Med likely indicates a higher-margin engagement compared to basic infrastructure provision [2].

The partnership's innovative nature - creating what appears to be the first academic medical center without traditional data centers - provides Rackspace with a high-profile reference implementation that could attract similar institutions looking to modernize their infrastructure while maintaining compliance with healthcare regulations like HIPAA [2].

As part of its long-term digital strategy, Dell Med plans to build a new academic medical center without a traditional physical data center. Rackspace will host and manage critical components of the system’s digital infrastructure, including Epic and other clinical workloads, through secure, compliant cloud services designed with redundancy to support patient safety, regulatory standards, and system resilience [1].

References:
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dell-medical-school-taps-rackspace-130500606.html
[2] https://www.stocktitan.net/news/RXT/dell-medical-school-taps-rackspace-for-industry-disrupting-cloud-6h0qahnbbsq4.html