From serving more informed and empowered patients, to fending off industry disruptors, to coping with a pandemic – it’s never been more urgent for healthcare providers to digitally transform.
Whether investing in telehealth and digital front doors, shifting more critical systems to the cloud, or adopting advanced analytics to improve patient scheduling, this industry is working tirelessly to catch up.
Leveraging technology is the key to delivering better care, engaging stakeholders, and harnessing critical data. AHEAD helps create the balance for healthcare organizations through six different pillars of digital transformation.
We Build Platforms for Digital Health
Healthcare transformation involves much more than pilots in telehealth, artificial intelligence, or medical device IoT. It requires fundamental changes in culture, communications, operations, and not least of all, the underlying infrastructure. Without a foundation in place, your digital health initiatives will stall.
We created our Digital Healthcare Delivery platform to propel your transformation. It represents the constituent parts that are key to enabling change and innovation. Consider it a reference architecture to make your own.
Industry Challenges for Healthcare
Digital Transformation Enables Balance
Healthcare organizations often put IT operations and innovation on hold while trying to determine a clear strategic vision, priorities, and funding for technology investments. AHEAD assists organizations in making forward-thinking investment decisions that enable healthcare IT leaders to strategize and execute effectively.
The solutions we provide are aligned and tailored depending on the size of a health system, while resolving many of the following common challenges:
PLANNING & INVESTING WITH NO ROOM FOR ERROR
Hospital system IT executives must make pioneering investment decisions, prioritize effectively, and execute without hesitation. The inability to do so has long-term, compounding negative impacts.
Due to the rapidly changing landscape, leading a successful digital transformation effort can be challenging. Healthcare systems cannot simply hit ‘pause’ to develop a plan.
AHEAD Advisory Services for Healthcare maximize the value of our clients’ technology investments while streamlining IT operations and innovation.
BUILDING & MAINTAINING FLUID INFRASTRUCTURE AT SCALE
Infrastructure is the enabling force of digital healthcare. Understanding needs, optimizing architecture, and operating flawlessly is difficult for healthcare systems of all sizes.
Too often, an aging infrastructure has assets with stalled lifecycles, which hinder hospital operations and put patients at risk. AHEAD Digital Solutions for Healthcare provide robust and scalable connectivity to support a constantly growing set of devices, systems, and experiences.
AHEAD’s Cloud Suitability Assessment is designed to offer a broad overview of your data center environment based on cloud readiness, cloud macroeconomics, and workload optimization and prioritization, providing recommendations for the ‘next steps’ approach.
HARNESSING & LEVERAGING MASSIVE DATA SETS
Data is the lifeblood of healthcare. It powers clinical care, determines reimbursement by payers, dictates capacity and staffing, and drives policy.
Unfortunately, it is incredibly difficult for health systems to engineer large and constantly expanding datasets when much of that data is non-integrated, inconsistent, and multi-formatted.
AHEAD’s Digital Solutions for Healthcare provide the modern skills and resources necessary for discovering actionable insights through our Analytics Hub. The Analytics Hub was designed to help data scientists explore data and drive value using cutting-edge tools and technologies.
IMPLEMENTING AGILE APPLICATIONS AS FORCE MULTIPLIERS
Accelerated innovation is now a business requirement – not an option. Healthcare organizations that innovate faster remain competitive and thrive in the digital economy but are often faced with a lack of alignment and accountability, focusing on the project over the product.
AHEAD’s Modern Application Development for Healthcare helps organizations produce high-quality digital products faster. This includes modern web and digital apps, modern APIs, and pipeline applications.
SECURING THE ENTERPRISE UNDER CONSTANT ATTACK
Unfortunately, healthcare is the most targeted industry for all data breaches since 2018. Hospitals have extensive vulnerabilities due to their large and complex IT environments as well as the proliferation of IoT devices.
By implementing a robust and proactive cybersecurity plan, AHEAD can ensure that your security solutions are proactive, not reactive.
Whether we are tasked with setting up Zero Trust network access or developing cloud-based security controls, AHEAD provides the peace of mind that comes with knowing your healthcare organization is secure.
HAVING THE RIGHT PEOPLE WITH THE RIGHT SKILLS TO MAKE IT ALL WORK
AHEAD is uniquely positioned to help healthcare enterprises embrace—and more importantly, achieve—digital transformation. Our advisory experts can analyze your business and IT operations, recommend opportunities for improvement, and help build investment cases.
Our technology expertise spans across cloud, apps, data, operations, and cybersecurity to stitch everything together, making it work properly and at scale.
AHEAD’s Managed Services capabilities help identify and fill skills gaps while ensuring that healthcare organizations’ IT teams maintain day-to-day priorities without having to deviate to another area.
In the Era of COVID-19 Cost Optimization is Crucial
Data Center Practice Director, John Cole, describes how we used our Harvest to Invest program to identify significant cost savings at a large healthcare system.

Our Clients
We serve more than 60 health systems across the U.S., including IDNs, academics, specialist clinics, and non-profits – as well as others in the healthcare ecosystem like payers and service providers. Check out our client stories.
Key Provider Clients









Healthcare Ecosystem Clients





AHEAD Perspectives on Healthcare Transformation
Our mission and tagline is Learn. Grow. Achieve. To that end, our engineers and consultants invest in thought leadership. Check out some of our healthcare content from our resource hub, AHEAD i/o.






Partner Perspectives
We collaborate every day with our partners to ensure success for our clients. See a selection of their perspectives on healthcare IT below.



Meet Our Digital Health Team
Below are a few of our team members dedicated to healthcare transformation.

Tony Blood
Managing Director
Andy Sajous
Field CTO
Freddie Schindler
Principal Architect
Josh Perkins
Field CTO
Greg Bluth
Principal Consultant
Chris McMillen
EVP of Sales, US South and Southwest
Dylan Hedges
Managing Director
Ashley Larcinese
Client Director
Dave Burland
Client Director
Daniel Plourde
Client Director
Matt Fahey
Client Director