A Leading Healthcare Data Platform Modernizes Their Oracle Estate with Tessell

About 

One of the largest healthcare data connectivity providers in the United States operates a mission-critical platform that enables secure exchange and management of health information across the entire healthcare ecosystem. The company's infrastructure processes billions of healthcare records annually, connecting life sciences organizations, healthcare providers, payers, research institutions, and technology partners across all 50 states.Its platform enables organizations to securely connect, exchange, and manage health data while maintaining privacy and compliance with regulations like HIPAA.

The company works with a broad ecosystem - life sciences organizations, healthcare providers, payers, and technology partners ensuring that critical health data flows seamlessly across systems to improve patient outcomes and advance medical research.

With data volumes growing rapidly and healthcare workloads becoming increasingly complex, their Oracle databases form the backbone of its operations. Ensuring these databases could scale efficiently, remain resilient, and support future innovation was a strategic priority.

Why Cloud? Why Now?

For this healthcare data leader, moving to the cloud was not about replacing outdated systems - it was about scaling for the future. The company needed to:

• Modernize operations to support growing healthcare data volumes and customer demand.
  
  
• Enhance scalability and resiliency to ensure uninterrupted access to critical workloads.
  
  
• Optimize efficiency and performance, while maintaining strict compliance and security requirements.

To achieve this, the healthcare data provider chose AWS as its cloud platform and partnered with Tessell to lead a technically complex and business-critical migration.

The Challenge

Migrating the company’s Oracle estate was technically complex, with multiple databases, mixed versions, and strict cutover requirements that left no room for error.

• Scale and complexity - 18 Oracle databases, including six production systems totaling 67.5 TB of sensitive data, formed the core of the company’s healthcare data platform, and the backbone of their platform. Migrating this securely was essential to ensuring uninterrupted access for researchers, providers, and payers working to improve patient outcomes.
  
  
• Mixed versions - Some databases were already on Oracle 19c, while others remained on 11g and required in-place upgrades to 19c during migration.
  
  
• Tight downtime window -  Production cutover had to be completed within just 12 hours, leaving no margin for extended outages. Exceeding it could have disrupted healthcare organizations depending on the data provider for timely data exchange in clinical and research workflows.
  
  
• Observability requirements - Multiple services running on shared VMs, which meant 100% observability was a non-negotiable requirement -, demanding precise integration of tools like Datadog and Oracle OEM - both to safeguard HIPAA-regulated data and to maintain trust with the healthcare ecosystem.
  
  
• Compliance constraints - Because they handle highly sensitive healthcare data, every step of the process has to adhere to strict security and regulatory requirements.

A traditional lift-and-shift approach was never an option. The combination of scale, downtime sensitivity, and compliance demands required a smarter, highly orchestrated strategy.

How Tessell Made It Happen

Powered by an AI-native control plane, Tessell provided the foundation for the data provider - bringing automation, observability, and compliance into a single, orchestrated workflow.

Tailored Migration Strategies

Tessell supported a dual migration approach combining RMAN copy for six databases and Oracle Data Guard for six production systems. This ensured seamless replication, minimal downtime, and a predictable production cutover.

In-Place Version Upgrades

Built-in upgrade automation enabled 11g-to-19c migrations within the same 12-hour cutover window, eliminating the need for a separate upgrade project and reducing overall risk and effort.

Right-Sized Infrastructure

Through workload analytics and AWR-driven insights, Tessell provisioned AWS EC2 environments tailored to company’s performance profile - maximizing efficiency and minimizing over-provisioning.

Unified Observability

Tessell integrated Datadog monitoring with Oracle OEM through its unified observability layer, providing 100% visibility across shared VMs and real-time insight into database performance and health.

Compliance-First Execution

Designed for healthcare-grade workloads, Tessell enforced security and regulatory guardrails at every stage, ensuring continuous adherence to HIPAA and industry standards.

By combining automation, intelligence, and built-in compliance, Tessell transformed a complex migration into a streamlined, well-orchestrated cloud transition- laying the groundwork for the company’s scalable, cloud-first future.

Execution Journey

The migration followed a phased approach:

1. Pilot → Six databases migrated using RMAN copy to validate approach.
   
   
2. Rollout → Six production databases migrated with Oracle Data Guard, replicating continuously for nearly a month before cutover.
   
   
3. Go-live →  Final in-place upgrades from 11g to 19c executed within a tight 12-hour cutover window, followed by application validation and successful handover.

Business Impact & Outcomes

The modernization empowered the healthcare data provider with a cloud-first foundation, delivering both immediate results and long-term strategic advantages:

• Reliability: Always-on access to healthcare data → uninterrupted clinical workflows. 67.5 TB migrated with in-place upgrades and delivered without service disruption, enabling healthcare partners to continue research and care delivery seamlessly.
  
• Compliance: Zero compliance gaps → reduced regulatory risk.
  
• Efficiency:
  
  • 67.5 TB migrated securely ensuring researchers, providers, and payers have uninterrupted access to insights that improve patient outcomes.
  • Providing version upgrades in one cutover → avoided a separate multi-month upgrade project.‍
• Scalability: Cloud-first foundation → prepared to meet rising demand from life sciences and healthcare customers.
• 12-hour cutover achieved → Ensured zero downtime for critical health data exchanges during go-live.
• 100% observability → Strengthened compliance and security, reinforcing trust in the data provider’s role as a health data custodian.
  
  

Beyond the numbers, the impact was transformational:

• Operational transformation → Shifted to a streamlined, cloud-first model on AWS, reducing complexity and overhead.
  
  
• Resiliency & availability → Strengthened disaster recovery posture with Oracle Data Guard, enabling always-on operations.
  
  
• Performance & cost optimization → Rightsized infrastructure using workload insights to ensure efficiency and lower TCO.
  
  
• Future readiness → Built a scalable foundation to handle rapidly growing healthcare data workloads with confidence.

Together, these outcomes positioned the organization to move faster, scale smarter, and serve healthcare customers with greater reliability.

Looking Ahead

The migration to AWS was a key milestone, but it’s only the start of the company’s cloud journey with Tessell. Today, Tessell continues to provide managed services, performance optimization, and end-to-end observability. “By modernizing its data estate, the company not only gained a scalable, resilient platform - it strengthened its ability to connect healthcare organizations with the timely, trusted data they need to improve patient outcomes.