Seattle Children's Hospital and Rackspace Discuss the Power of Strategic Partnerships at ViVE 2025

Healthcare providers are challenged more today than ever before. Healthcare teams are confronted with reduced budgets, a shrinking workforce, pressure to innovate and intensifying cybersecurity risks. At the same time, they are expected to continue to deliver on the needs of their organizations, caregivers and patients.

To deliver on its IT goals, Seattle Children's Hospital engaged Rackspace Technology in 2024 to host and manage its Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. Rackspace provided a fully managed private cloud infrastructure solution for three Epic environments. The managed hosting infrastructure allowed the hospital system to focus on high-value strategic initiatives that helped improve patient care and optimize the business of serving its community.

In 2025, Seattle Children's expanded its relationship with Rackspace into a strategic partnership. Now, Rackspace operates the healthcare system’s entire IT operation. This move is designed to help the organization focus on its core mission, delivering the highest quality patient care across its 47 locations in four Pacific Northwest states.

The strategic partnership is designed to help Seattle Children’s achieve three critical outcomes — the ability to do more with less, to drive innovation and to strengthen its security posture. In February 2025, the two entities gave a presentation at ViVE 2025 to share insights at the session, Optimizing Digital Strategies Through Strategic Partnerships.

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Optimizing digital strategies through a strategic partnership

At the ViVE session, Dr. Zafar Chaudry, Seattle Children's SVP – Chief Digital Officer, Chief AI and CIO, and Rackspace Executive in Residence, Jason Jones, discussed the IT collaboration between the two entities. They highlighted Seattle Children’s three primary goals in forging its new 10-year IT management partnership with Rackspace — IT modernization, strong security posture and cost savings.

Chaudry began the discussion by emphasizing his focus as an IT leader. “Our focus is always on why we’re in business,” he said. “And we’re in the patient business, not the IT business. Our systems must run smoothly, but the focus must always be on our patients.

“We determined that we could not achieve our IT goals on our own,” Chaudry continued. “We needed a strong partner who understood our environment and how to build and manage world-class infrastructures, support them, refresh them and work around the clock. Rackspace met all our criteria.”

Goal 1: Attain a wholesale IT modernization transformation

Seattle Children’s top IT transformation goals are:

• Achieve 99.999% uptime across its 1,600 applications.
• Establish real-time KPI tracking to demonstrate progress and accountability quarterly for the hospital’s board of directors.

Chaudry explained the process of moving from managing IT internally to partnering with an IT management services provider. “When we began our internal conversations about our rapidly aging IT systems, our overriding challenge was how we were going to modernize from a stable but largely manual system,” Chaudry said. “We needed a way to get from where we were to a modern, transformed digital state that is fully automated with defined service levels that our physicians can depend on, and that doesn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require a staff of hundreds to make that happen.

What we did is enter into a 10-year strategic partnership with Rackspace where they have taken over our infrastructure, our networking, our network operations center and our security,” Chaudry continued. “We have agreed upon gates along the 10-year journey, with defined timelines to occur at various stages. This is vital to helping us move from our current mode of operations to the vision of a Rackspace Healthcare Cloud with full automation. Our long-term goal is to get from a stable operation in our current state to nirvana with a fully transformed digital state.”

Goal 2: Strengthen cybersecurity posture

Seattle Children’s top security goals are:

• Optimize its security posture without compromising patient care.
• Achieve ongoing world-class security and operational excellence in a high-risk healthcare environment.

“The thing that keeps me up at night is the whole cybersecurity piece,” said Chaudry. “I ask myself, how can I continue to invest in security without taking away from patient care? The job of our partner Rackspace is to make us as secure as possible because there is no 100% guarantee in the high-risk healthcare industry.”

Goal 3: Optimize IT spend to do more with less

Seattle Children’s top cost optimization goals are:

• Prioritize IT investments that directly support patient outcomes.
• Realize a 10% to 12% real cash savings over 10 years.

Among the organization’s financial changes was a transition from high capital investment to a consumption-based model. Chaudry said, “From a financial perspective, people ask: Will you actually save any money in this new partnership? We projected a 10-year model with both Seattle Children’s continuing to manage IT versus Rackspace managing our IT for us. Over the course of our 10-year partnership, we’re looking at about 10% to 12% real cash savings.

“That is funds we can use to invest in patient care,” he added. “Plus, we gain the soft benefits of having around-the-clock IT support, better uptime and stronger security. Those benefits will also positively impact patient care.”

Chaudry wrapped up the discussion with this thought: “Strategic partnerships can be beneficial,” he said. “But you have to do a lot of legwork to make sure they fit for your organization, and you have to find the right partner with aligned values and expertise.”

Interested in learning more about Rackspace Healthcare Cloud? Go here.