Azure for mission-critical workloads in healthcare: EHR and beyond
In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, digital transformation is no longer a luxury but a necessity. One of the most critical components of this transformation is the electronic health record (EHR) system, which plays a pivotal role in healthcare operations and care delivery. Organizations are actively exploring alternatives for their traditional on-premises infrastructures to overcome significant challenges, including high capital expenditure, frequent expensive hardware refresh cycles, outdated security protocols, and most importantly, managing the data web of siloed systems. By leveraging connected EHR systems in the cloud, providers can also unlock the full potential of their data and further deliver data-driven AI innovations.
Azure for mission-critical workloads
Migrating EHR systems to Microsoft Azure provides healthcare organizations with a robust platform for mission-critical workloads, ensuring optimized performance, fast data access, built-in disaster recovery, and enhanced security features, such as AI-powered threat detection and automated compliance monitoring. On top of that, Azure maximizes cloud investments, offering new possibilities to harness data to springboard AI innovations.
Data is at the heart of healthcare. Hospitals produce more than 50 petabytes of data across more than 10 siloed systems every year. As the healthcare industry faces the dual challenges of managing vast amounts of unstructured data and a shortage of workforce, up to 97% of healthcare data goes unused, highlighting a significant missed opportunity for operational excellence and better patient insights.1 One of the biggest benefits for healthcare customers on Azure is the ability to unify their multi-modal healthcare data for analytics and AI with healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric that lets them ingest, store, and analyze data from various sources and modalities. While Fabric unifies your data, Microsoft Purview delivers the data governance service that helps you classify the data across your data estate, including identification for sensitive data. Integrating Microsoft Purview with healthcare data solutions in Fabric not only strengthens security but also help you ensure compliance, enabling healthcare organizations to govern their data with confidence. We are acutely aware of the industry expectations in which our technology is utilized, and this is one of the many reasons why our healthcare customers trust Azure for mission-critical workloads.
As we continue to deliver data innovations, we see our customers use their connected data on a wide spectrum of AI capabilities. With Azure AI, healthcare organizations can accelerate innovation through predictive analytics, automate clinical tasks, and improve patient interactions with the help of ambient AI solutions like DAX Copilot (directly embedded in EHR systems), as well as take advantage of Microsoft healthcare AI models in Azure AI Foundry and GitHub, a collection of cutting-edge multi-modal generative AI models that benefit imaging and radiology workflows.
Enhanced support for mission-critical
Mission-critical workloads demand comprehensive support. In 2024, Microsoft Unified enhanced its support for mission-critical workloads in healthcare through its Mission Critical Offerings. This initiative provides proactive support to improve the health, resiliency, and performance of healthcare systems via regular assessments, guidance, and optimization recommendations, ensuring business continuity and addressing unique healthcare challenges.
Collaborating for technology excellence: A strategic partnership that stands out
Our commitment to mission-critical is reflected in our collaborations with leading EHR providers such as Epic®. This long-standing relationship of more than 20 years has yielded an optimized solution for Epic® on Azure, offering a robust, purpose-built platform backed by joint-reference architecture. Recently, Microsoft announced expanded scalability on Azure for healthcare organizations, specifically for running Epic®’s Chronicles* Operational Database (ODB), increasing its capacity to 65 million global references per second (GRefs/s), a 171% enhancement from 2023 on the new Mbv3 VM series.
The collaboration with Epic® extends well beyond the cloud infrastructure—to several products and capabilities part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Epic® and Microsoft have expanded their collaboration to integrate advanced AI technologies such as Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and the DAX Copilot into Epic®’s EHR system. The integration helps provide AI-powered clinical insights, streamline administrative processes, and improve clinician productivity through features like note summarization and automated coding suggestions.
Delivering value beyond infrastructure: The Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare promise
Microsoft’s well-rounded partnership with Epic® is one of the many reasons why Azure is the cloud of choice for many of our healthcare customers.
The decision to move mission-critical workloads to the cloud is often not just about infrastructure. Customers like Mercy chose Azure to not only modernize their infrastructure but also extract value from sizeable data archives. Mercy’s digital transformation on Azure enabled it to connect previously siloed data and use several Microsoft services such as Azure Data Lake to result in positive business outcomes. For example, by empowering care teams with smart dashboards and insights into factors that determine patient discharge, Mercy has been able to reduce patient stay durations significantly. Mercy employs Azure AI Document Intelligence to scan and recognize information on patient’s insurance cards which then gets updated on their EHR records automatically.
We recognize our customer’s desire to have a complete digital transformation in the cloud that transcends every layer of the stack, and Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare lets us deliver to that promise. It encapsulates a broad spectrum of innovative data and AI innovations from Microsoft, purpose-built for the healthcare industry, enabling our customers to achieve their cloud-first goals faster and easier. Recently, Microsoft announced several innovations as part of the portfolio, including new healthcare AI models in Azure AI Foundry, capabilities for healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, the healthcare agent service in Copilot Studio, and an AI-powered nursing workflow solution.
As customers realize the value of consolidating their IT investments around a single vendor, Azure is increasingly being adopted for mission-critical workloads. By seamlessly connecting and delivering value across all layers of the stack, Azure for mission-critical extends a customer’s return on cloud investments. Customers like St. Luke’s University Health System are reaping the benefits of their Epic® on Azure migration by taking advantage of several synergies in the Microsoft portfolio, like the interoperability of Microsoft Teams with Epic®. Security is of paramount importance when dealing with patient records, and customers like Jefferson Health migrate their Epic® environments to Azure with high confidence with Microsoft Defender for end-point detection and response.
Next steps
As we continue to transform mission-critical workloads in the cloud, we are making it easier for our partners and customers to create connected experiences at every point of care, empower their healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from their data, all with uncompromised privacy and security. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is supporting healthcare organizations on every step of their journey toward shaping a healthier future.
- Explore Epic® on Azure.
- Learn more about the Mbv3 VM series.
- Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.
*Epic® and Chronicles are trademarks of Epic Systems Corporation.
1 World Economic Forum, 4 ways data is improving healthcare, December 2019.
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Source: Microsoft Industry Blog