Case Study: 3M Health Information Systems achieves scalable, cost-efficient processing of millions of medical records with Amazon Web Services

3M - Customer Case Study

3M Health Information Systems (3M HIS), based in Salt Lake City, is a leading provider of healthcare software—including the 3M 360 Encompass System—used by 7,500 hospitals in 20+ countries. The company struggled with multiple collocated IT centers that forced it to maintain costly peak compute capacity for highly variable workloads (processing peaks ~18 hours/day), suffered long server‑provisioning times (~10+ weeks), and lacked the agility needed to support researchers and speed innovation.

3M HIS migrated core applications to AWS with help from AWS Professional Services, using EC2, S3, RDS and AWS DevOps services (CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CloudFormation, CodePipeline, IAM). The cloud move enabled minute‑scale provisioning and on‑demand scaling (e.g., spinning up 200 instances for large jobs), improved a key process’s efficiency by ~20%, cut deployments from six weeks to weekly (with plans for multiple daily), reduced costs by eliminating unused peak capacity, and freed R&D to focus on healthcare analytics rather than IT operations.

3M

David Frazee

Chief Technology Officer