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 Unification and Governance
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. 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.
AI Innovations
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
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.
Delivering Value Beyond Infrastructure
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.
Conclusion
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.
FAQs
Q: What are the benefits of migrating EHR systems to Microsoft Azure?
A: 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.
Q: How does Azure help unify healthcare data?
A: Azure helps unify healthcare data through healthcare data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, which lets them ingest, store, and analyze data from various sources and modalities.
Q: What AI innovations are available on Azure?
A: Azure AI offers a wide spectrum of AI capabilities, including predictive analytics, automated clinical tasks, and improved patient interactions with the help of ambient AI solutions like DAX Copilot and Microsoft healthcare AI models in Azure AI Foundry and GitHub.
Q: What is the Mission Critical Offerings initiative?
A: The Mission Critical Offerings 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.
Q: What is the relationship between Microsoft and Epic?
A: Microsoft and Epic have a long-standing relationship of more than 20 years, yielding an optimized solution for Epic on Azure, offering a robust, purpose-built platform backed by joint-reference architecture.
