Jefferson Serves 4.5M Patients a Year without Disruption and Migrates Epic to the Cloud with Rubrik
Our mission is clear: to improve lives. As a nonprofit organization, patient safety must come first, outweighing all other considerations. Rubrik is a strategic enabler for us to carry on our mission, day in and day out.
Mark Odom
Chief Technology Officer & Chief Information Security Officer, Jefferson![]()
CHALLENGES
Mark Odom, CTO & CISO, leads large-scale digital transformation across Jefferson Health, one of the nation’s largest and most diverse healthcare systems that includes two universities, 11 colleges, a health plan, 32 hospitals, and a large research contingency. After experiencing multiple mergers and acquisitions that resulted in unscalable costs from tape infrastructure, Jefferson Health sought a ‘best of species’ technology that would transform the status quo and provide a secure, resilient, and cost-effective data security strategy in response to:
OUTCOMES
Collaborating with Rubrik enabled Jefferson to achieve:
A ‘Best of Species’ Data Security Platform
By leveraging Rubrik’s single, SLA-driven platform, Jefferson can automate BCDR while achieving near-instant recoveries in the event of ransomware. Out-of-the-box RBAC integrates seamlessly with Active Directory, enabling teams to manage and monitor data across all hospitals, universities, and research sites through a single interface. This streamlined environment not only frees up IT resources but also simplifies compliance reporting for audits and stringent healthcare regulations like HIPAA and HITECH. If found not compliant or fail an audit, that could cost Jefferson millions of dollars in fines and irreparable reputational damage.
TRANSFORMATION WITH RUBRIK
An Epic Transformation
Under a board-level mandate to migrate all Epic workloads to Azure within 12 months, Odom was tasked with ensuring secure, resilient, and cost-effective data security across various environments, including dorms, high-end research computing, and recently acquired hospital systems.
To guarantee the continuous availability of Epic, Jefferson’s EMR system, Odom evaluated over 800 applications across its environment, establishing a tiering system to prioritize mission-critical workloads for rapid recovery.
“Ensuring that Epic is always available is a complex challenge,” Odom explained. “Epic is the heart of our business, encompassing numerous modules and interconnected systems. So when we say that Epic needs to be up, we are referring to the tier one, core elements that support patient care, including laboratory and radiology systems – each of which has specific timelines to be brought offline and back online.”
Given the diverse range of users within the organization, Odom noted the importance of prioritizing systems based on patient safety: “In discussions with researchers, it can be challenging to convey that although their work is critical, it may not take precedence over immediate patient needs. When patients are on a surgery bed, their safety and care is our primary focus.” He emphasized, “While revenue generation is essential, Jefferson’s mission is clear: to improve lives. As a nonprofit organization, patient safety must come first, outweighing all other considerations.”
Epic is the heart of our business, encompassing numerous modules and interconnected systems. With Rubrik, we were able to migrate our entire Epic system to Azure within 12 months, with robust security controls in place.
Mark Odom
Chief Technology Officer & Chief Information Security Officer, Jefferson![]()