Microsoft this past week announced a new cloud-based hosting service for Epic clients, with Mount Sinai Health System one of the first to make use of it.

WHY IT MATTERS
Microsoft says Azure Large Instances is designed with the scale of large Epic electronic health record databases in mind, beyond the previous limits of shared public cloud infrastructure. It is capable of handling up to 50 million database accesses per second, for instance.

Mount Sinai, a longtime Microsoft client, continues to migrate many of its EHR workloads to Azure – and now has the largest production instance of Epic running on Azure in the world, according to Microsoft. It offers agility, cost management and risk reductions by offloading the data center and hardware management to Microsoft.

"We are very excited about this move as it further enables digital transformation, accelerates artificial intelligence 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, chief digital and information officer at Mount Sinai.

THE LARGER TREND
This past month, Healthcare IT News reported a case study showing how Mount Sinai used cloud-based AI tools to unlock largely untapped surgical data, digging into surgery video to help understand care processes and improve outcomes.

ON THE RECORD
"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, in a statement.

"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 secure, scalable and agile public cloud solutions," said Tom McGuinness, corporate vice president for global healthcare and life sciences at Microsoft. "These benefits are key to helping healthcare organizations succeed, particularly as they navigate through today's economic landscape."

Mike Miliard is executive editor of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.