UTA’s Office of Information Technology recently worked with Health Services to both migrate and upgrade their ProPharm system. ProPharm had to be moved off premise as part of the overall OIT move to Azure but Health Services wanted OIT to continue supporting the system, and OIT and HS took this opportunity to upgrade the ProPharm software platform to a newer version provided by UTA.
OIT met with Health Services and determined the best course of action and a project plan, and worked with their vendor ProPharm, a Division of Fusion Health. Then, they worked with Enterprise Data Services, the database admins for the database/managed instance; IO System Ops for the Azure server; and IO Network Ops for networking.
The previous ProPharm system had both the application and the database on the same server, which presents potential security and performance issues, and was on aging software and hardware. The new system provides the new Azure server for the application, and the database was rehomed onto EDS’ Azure SQL Managed Instance, which is a managed database (DBaaS) offering from Azure. The Azure SQL Managed Instance provides a lot of advantages, like automatic patching. This new architecture provides better security and manageability.
“It’s more secure, less problems, and with a vendor with better infrastructure to maintain servers,” said Hekmat Abasi, Information Analyst in Health Services. “The system still works the same; it’s the same software just on a different platform. The major difference is the backend which is a much more stable, secure environment.”
This project was executed spring 2022 and went live June 13, 2022.
