New Azure Large Instances allows healthcare providers to manage large EHR database loads using public cloud-hosted infrastructure
REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced that Epic clients, starting with Mount Sinai Health System (Mount Sinai), one of New York City’s largest academic medical systems, can use Microsoft Azure Large Instances, a solution designed to achieve the scale needed to run the large Epic electronic health record (EHR) database — up to 50 million database accesses per second. Azure Large Instances leverages dedicated resources, which allows Mount Sinai and other Epic clients to scale beyond the previous limits of shared public cloud infrastructure solutions.
Through close collaboration with Accenture, Mount Sinai continues to migrate many of its workloads to Azure and now has the largest production instance of Epic running on Azure in the world. “We are very excited about this move as it further enables digital transformation, accelerates artificial intelligence (AI) and innovation, provides scalability and flexibility, and reduces upfront infrastructure costs, ultimately leading to improved care and discovery as well as streamlined operations,” said Kristin Myers, executive vice president, chief digital and information officer, and dean for digital and information technology at Mount Sinai.
At the core of healthcare provider organizations and care delivery is the EHR, a real-time, patient-centered record that contains the medical and treatment history of a patient, giving providers a broad view of a patient’s care. As healthcare organizations manage an increasingly complex care landscape and challenging economic conditions, there is a growing desire to consolidate and exit on-premises data centers and build for further innovation. “Going through this digital transformation requires partners who understand our health system’s mission and the criticality of patient care,” said Joseph Gimigliano, chief technology officer at Mount Sinai. Microsoft’s long-standing collaboration with Epic includes enabling the migration of Epic EHR environments to Azure through ongoing joint testing and engineering.
“Our mission is to empower the healthcare industry to achieve more, helping to deliver the best experiences for providers and patients,” said Tom McGuinness, corporate vice president, global healthcare & life sciences at Microsoft. “Through our collaboration with Epic, we are delivering innovation for customers on Azure that will help healthcare organizations reduce the complexity of infrastructure management and control costs with a secure, scalable and agile public cloud solution. These benefits are key to helping healthcare organizations succeed, particularly as they navigate through today’s economic landscape.”
Moving to a cloud-first computing model is essential for many healthcare providers looking to implement a digital transformation strategy to enable better care at lower costs. Healthcare organizations are faced with the increased costs of hardware, software, installation, maintenance and management of healthcare IT landscapes on-premises as well as with the difficulty of finding and retaining staff to build and manage highly available, secure and compliant environments. Azure offers opportunities for agility, cost management and risk reductions by offloading the data center and hardware management to Microsoft. With faster time to value from current investments in the cloud and opportunities to innovate quickly, organizations can rethink how they utilize data and AI and take a digital health platform approach.
