UCI Health

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UCI Health migrates FDA-compliant radiology imaging to AWS with Xpertech

Executive summary

UCI Health modernized its radiology imaging platform by migrating the FDA-approved Visage solution to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Working with AWS Partner Xpertech, UCI Health first established a HIPAA-compliant AWS landing zone and private network connectivity using AWS Direct Connect. Xpertech then migrated Visage to a highly available, hot-hot architecture on AWS, deploying large Amazon EC2 instances, clustered DICOM services, and SQL Server databases. The solution was validated through continuous backup, recovery, and failover testing to meet 99.99% uptime service level objectives.

Customer overview

UCI Health is the clinical enterprise of the University of California, Irvine, serving nearly four million people across Orange County, western Riverside County, and southeast Los Angeles County. UCI Medical Center features Orange County’s only National Cancer Institute–designated Comprehensive Cancer Center and supports advanced clinical care, research, and education.

As part of its cloud strategy, UCI Health sought to migrate mission-critical clinical systems to AWS while maintaining strict HIPAA compliance, performance, and availability requirements for radiology workflows.

Challenge

UCI Health needed to migrate its radiology imaging platform to the cloud without disrupting clinical operations. The Visage imaging system is an FDA-compliant, mission-critical application used by radiologists for diagnostic imaging and requires consistent performance, low latency, and near-continuous availability.

In addition to the application itself, the environment included large SQL Server databases and DICOM services that needed to be deployed in a highly available configuration. UCI Health also required secure, private connectivity between AWS and on-premises clinical systems and needed assurance that the cloud architecture could meet stringent uptime and disaster recovery expectations.

Solution

Xpertech delivered a security-first migration program on AWS, beginning with the design and implementation of a HIPAA-compliant AWS landing zone. The landing zone established a multi-account architecture with centralized logging, encryption by default, identity governance, and network segmentation aligned with healthcare security best practices.

Xpertech then implemented AWS Direct Connect to provide private, low-latency connectivity between UCI Health’s on-premises environment and AWS, integrated with VPN failover to ensure network resiliency.

Following the landing zone deployment, Xpertech migrated the FDA-approved Visage radiology platform to AWS. The solution was designed as a hot-hot, highly available architecture, deploying large Amazon EC2 instances across multiple Availability Zones. These EC2 instances hosted Visage application components as well as SQL Server databases required by the imaging platform.

To support imaging workflows, DICOM services were deployed in a clustered, highly available configuration. Continuous backup, recovery testing, and high-availability failover testing were conducted to validate the design and ensure that the environment could meet 99.99% uptime service level objectives.

Key solution components included:
• HIPAA-compliant AWS landing zone with multi-account isolation and centralized audit logging
• Private connectivity using AWS Direct Connect with VPN failover
• Hot-hot, multi–Availability Zone EC2 architecture for FDA-compliant Visage workloads
• SQL Server databases deployed on EC2 with high availability considerations
• Clustered DICOM services designed for resilience and performance
• Continuous backup, recovery validation, and HA failover testing to meet 99.99% uptime targets

Results

With the AWS-based Visage platform in place, UCI Health achieved a highly resilient and secure radiology imaging environment in the cloud. The hot-hot architecture and clustered services improved fault tolerance, while private connectivity ensured reliable integration with on-premises clinical systems.

The solution standardized security controls, strengthened audit readiness, and provided confidence through repeated backup and failover testing. UCI Health now operates its radiology imaging platform on a scalable AWS foundation that supports current clinical needs while enabling future cloud adoption.

Key benefits included:
• 99.99% uptime validation through high-availability and failover testing
• Secure, FDA-compliant deployment of Visage on AWS
• Improved resilience for imaging and database workloads
• Private, low-latency connectivity using AWS Direct Connect
• A scalable, HIPAA-aligned cloud foundation for future clinical workloads

Next steps

UCI Health continues to evaluate additional clinical and operational workloads for migration to AWS. Future initiatives include expanding use of the established landing zone, onboarding new applications, and extending standardized governance and operational practices across the cloud environment.

About Xpertech

Xpertech is an AWS Partner that helps healthcare and regulated organizations migrate and modernize workloads on AWS. The company specializes in secure landing zones, compliance-aligned governance, and highly available clinical architectures. Xpertech’s XPERLOCK framework accelerates delivery of secure, multi-account cloud foundations with standardized controls, automation, and documentation to support HIPAA, SOC 2, and NIST-aligned requirements.