How Data Engineering Shapes Modern Healthcare Research
“We’ll get to modernization next fiscal year.” - Jeevan Dongre, CTO at AntStack
If I had a dollar for every time I heard that from healthcare technology leaders, I’d have enough to fund a small modernization initiative myself. The hesitation is understandable. Healthcare IT teams are already stretched thin, and any change comes with perceived risk.
But my learning from working with many healthcare organizations: The status quo has a cost that rarely appears on your balance sheet until it’s too late.
The CFO-CTO Disconnect
Last quarter, I led a modernization strategy workshop for a mid-sized hospital network. The CFO opened with a hard-hitting observation:
“Our tech spend is up 43% over last year. We were promised savings. I’m not seeing them. Should we rethink our modernization strategy?”
The CTO countered with technical reasons are dual-run systems, transitional overhead, long-term gains. But the CFO wanted immediate answers.
This tension isn’t rare. In fact, it’s the norm. Why? Because many modernization efforts are driven by infrastructure upgrades or vague digital transformation goals, not by a phased serverless-first strategy tied to measurable ROI.
The Real Cost Equation
When we partnered with Landauer, a radiation safety leader working with 78% of U.S. hospitals, their leadership initially focused on cutting infrastructure spend. But our modernization ROI assessment revealed hidden costs they weren’t tracking:
Delayed innovation – Their roadmap was lagging 9–12 months because legacy systems couldn’t support new features
Engineering attrition – Top developers left for orgs using modern stacks, costing $65,000+ per replacement
Overprovisioned infrastructure – Resources were sized for peak usage, which only occurred 15% of the time
Manual compliance overhead – 1.5 FTEs just to keep up with audits and checklists
Once we included these variables, the expected 20% savings turned into a 62% total cost reduction over three years with zero disruption to users.
The Cost of Half-Measures
One pattern I’ve observed repeatedly is the “lift and shift” trap. A healthcare organization modernizes but simply replicates their on-premises architecture on virtual machines. This approach creates the worst of both worlds: cloud prices with on-premises limitations.
A biopharma client discovered this the hard way. Their initial effort to modernize reduced their data center costs but actually increased their total infrastructure spend by 15%. Why? They were running EC2 instances 24/7 to support workloads that only ran a few hours each week.
After implementing a proper serverless architecture, their monthly cloud bill dropped by 50%, but more importantly, their data processing capacity increased by 300%. Their Director of Bioinformatics told me:
“We’re not just saving money, we’re processing genomic data sets that would have been impossible with our previous architecture. That’s accelerating our research timeline by months.”
Three Financial Metrics Healthcare CTOs Should Track
When making the case for modernization especially with serverless speak the language of finance. Here are the three metrics that resonate with CFOs:
1. Time-to-Market Acceleration
A therapeutics firm reduced time from code complete to production from 42 days to 11 days after adopting serverless.
That 31-day gain translated into $4.2M in annual opportunity on a $50M product line.
2. Cost-per-Transaction Efficiency
Traditional architectures scale linearly. Serverless scales inversely with usage due to event-based billing.
One analytics platform dropped query costs from $0.23 to $0.04. The same product went from a cost center to a profit driver without increasing pricing.
3. Compliance Automation ROI
Serverless infrastructure-as-code lets you embed HIPAA controls by default, not retroactively.
This can mean:
- Reduced audit prep time from 3 weeks to 3 days
- Avoided $450K in annual penalties from configuration inconsistencies
- Freed up security teams for proactive work instead of checklist chasing
The Migration Math: A Simple Formula for Healthcare CTOs
To help healthcare teams assess the true value of modernization, we developed this formula:
ROI = (Infra Savings + Operational Efficiency + Innovation Acceleration) / Modernization Investment
Where:
Infra Savings = Cloud cost + data center reduction
Operational Efficiency = FTE time saved × fully loaded cost
Innovation Acceleration = Time-to-market x value of features
Modernization Investment = Time, services, internal bandwidth
For most orgs, this model delivers 3.2× to 5.7× ROI over 3 years, with break-even in under 12 months.
The Four-Phase Approach to Financial Success
A phased approach ensures you see results early, without betting everything on a single migration:
Phase 1: Hybrid Coexistence
- Introduce serverless for reporting, batch jobs
- Maintain legacy ops with interface sheltering
- Lay compliance and observability foundations
Phase 2: Non-Critical Workload Modernization
- Migrate data pipelines, analytics, and logs
- Automate compliance controls for lower risk
- Document wins to build stakeholder momentum
Phase 3: Core System Transformation
- Move patient records, EHRs, and high-compliance workloads
- Introduce event-driven processing and cost scaling
- Sunset over-provisioned infra components
Phase 4: Fully Serverless Architecture
- Enable real-time applications and patient experiences
- Mature internal team into serverless experts
- Focus on continuous innovation and optimization
The Cost of Waiting Another Year
If you’re planning to “get to it next fiscal year,” consider this calculation we performed for a mid-sized healthcare system:
Their annual losses from maintaining the status quo totaled approximately $2.1M, broken down as:
- $720,000 in excess infrastructure costs
- $840,000 in operational inefficiency
- $540,000 in delayed innovation and competitive disadvantage
That’s $175,000 per month or approximately $5,750 every day they delayed. Suddenly, “next fiscal year” starts looking very expensive.
Taking the Next Step
If you’re a healthcare CTO or engineering leader struggling to make the financial case for serverless, you’re not alone. The technical benefits are clear, but translating them into financial terms that resonate with your CFO requires a different perspective.
That’s why we’ve created a comprehensive guide specifically for healthcare engineering leaders. Our Engineering Leader’s Playbook includes:
- ROI calculation templates specifically calibrated for healthcare organizations
- Benchmarking data from successful healthcare modernization
- Phase-by-phase financial projections that you can customize
- Communication frameworks for securing executive buy-in
This isn’t generic cloud advice, it’s healthcare-specific guidance based on real implementations with organizations facing the same compliance, integration, and financial pressures you’re navigating.
Download the Engineering Leader’s Playbook →Send to Landing page to download
The status quo isn’t free. Every day you delay, it is costing your organization money, competitive advantage, and innovation capacity. But with the right approach, you can turn that cost into an opportunity that even your CFO will celebrate.
