Mount Sinai Health System in New York is among the first health systems taking advantage of Microsoft Azure Large Instances, a solution designed to achieve the scale needed to run the large Epic electronic health record database — up to 50 million database accesses per second.
Microsoft said 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.
On its website, Microsoft explains Azure Large Instances this way: “Some workloads in the enterprise consist of technologies that just aren't designed to run in a typical virtualized cloud setting. They require special architecture, certified hardware, or extraordinarily large servers. Although those technologies have the most sophisticated data protection and business continuity features, they aren't built for the virtualized cloud. They're more sensitive to latencies and noisy neighbors and require more control over change management and maintenance activity. Azure Large Instances is built, certified, and tested for a select set of such applications.”
Working with Accenture, Mount Sinai is migrating 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 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, in a statement.
Microsoft notes that health system customers have a growing desire to consolidate and exit on-premises data centers and build for further innovation. The company says its long-standing collaboration with Epic includes enabling the migration of Epic EHR environments to Azure through ongoing joint testing and engineering.
“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,” said Tom McGuinness, corporate vice president, global healthcare & life sciences at Microsoft, in a statement.
