Microsoft Releases Public Cloud-Hosted Solution for Epic EHR

Microsoft Corp. has expanded its partnership with Epic by releasing a solution for healthcare organizations to manage large Epic EHR database loads using public cloud-hosted infrastructure.

The Azure Large Instances solution leverages dedicated resources, allowing Epic EHR users to scale beyond the prior limits of shared public cloud infrastructures.

Mount Sinai Health System, one of New York City’s largest academic medical systems, will be the first healthcare organization to leverage Azure Large Instances.

Mount Sinai now has the largest production instance of Epic running on Azure worldwide and continues to migrate many of its workflows.

“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,” Kristin Myers, executive vice president, chief digital and information officer, and dean for digital and information technology at Mount Sinai, said in a press release.

Moving to a cloud-first computing model can help healthcare organizations support better care delivery at lower costs. Organizations face increasing costs of hardware, software, installation, maintenance, and management of health IT on-premises.  

“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 of 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,” McGuiness added. “These benefits are key to helping healthcare organizations succeed, particularly as they navigate through today’s economic landscape.”

The Azure Large Instances announcement expands on vendors’ long-standing collaboration. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Epic announced an Azure OpenAI Service EHR integration to streamline clinical workflows.

The generative AI-powered solutions within the Epic EHR aim to boost productivity, enhance patient care delivery, and improve health system financial integrity.