Live @ HIMSS Partner Perspective Q&A with Mike Reinhart, Chairman & CEO, Quisitive: The Cloud Offers Significant Upside; but a Good Guide Sure Helps

The cloud can be a magical place of value and optimization – but only yields its secrets to those with the expertise to master it. The problem is that many health systems moved in too quickly or without that expertise, leaving IT executives in the position of having to go back and retro fit important elements like security. What’s more, “the cloud” is not one thing, but at least three, with distinct environments from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that each demand a different skill set. Microsoft Azure happens to be Quisitive’s sandbox. In this Live @ HIMSS Partner Perspective Interview with healthsystemCIO Founder & Editor-in-Chief Anthony Guerra, Mike Reinhart, Chairman & CEO at Quisitive talks about why operating in the cloud can be tricky business for the untrained, how proper configuration can break down on-prem data silos, and how AI will eventually turn mountains of data into actionable insights.

Bold Statements

… one of the big challenges in the healthcare system is all these data silos, and how do you really start to bring it together to derive meaningful insights.

One of the challenges – and you saw this during the pandemic – is that there was this mad rush to move to the cloud as people were looking for operational and other efficiencies. In that movement, a lot of what happened was not thinking through what should go to the cloud, and so you had a lot of things just get moved there out of necessity. What they found was you have to rethink whether this is about data or applications or others – not everything legacy should be moved in its current form into the cloud. It may not operate efficiently or doesn’t really unlock the benefits of the cloud. A lot of what has to happen is rethinking how data is brought together.

It’s an absolute necessity on the front end and, if you haven’t, you’ve got to go back. We’re seeing a lot of rework happening in that very space today to make sure that security is done right because of the threats that are increasingly related to hacking events.

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s Live at HIMSS Interview with Mike Reinhart, Chairman & CEO with Quisitive. Mike thanks for joining me.

Mike: Great to be here. Appreciate the opportunity to connect.

Anthony: Very good. Mike, why don’t you start out by telling me a little bit about your organization and your role.

Mike: Yes. Quisitive is a partner with Microsoft that provides services and solutions across many industries, with one of the key areas that we focus on around healthcare. But we have depth and breadth of expertise across the capabilities of Microsoft and their cloud across their Dynamics platform, their Azure environment that includes everything around infrastructure security, data and AI and the things that they bring to light there, as well as their end user footprints around Microsoft 365 which is a key component of their Copilot strategy in AI.

We work with enterprises across many different segments, working to deploy those technologies, build custom solutions on those technologies to enhance their interaction, whether it’s with patients or operationally inside the organization.

Anthony: A key characteristic of the company is the relationship with Microsoft, correct?

Mike: Absolutely.

Anthony: With that, is it safe to say you don’t really play with companies that are not Microsoft shops?

Mike: Yes, interestingly, every company has some component of what they’re doing with Microsoft, in particular some of the things that they’re doing with AI. While we don’t have deep expertise in some of the other cloud strategies, we know and understand how they need to interact with Microsoft as a component of a strategy. For larger enterprise organizations where they are multi-cloud strategy or multi-technology, we bring the expertise about how to really leverage the Microsoft platform in th...