Epic is the leading electronic health record (EHR) system provider in the United States, with more than a third of the total market share. Epic systems are used by a wide range of healthcare providers, from small practices and independent hospitals to large, multi-specialty hospital groups. Around the world, more than 305 million patients have records within an Epic system.
As healthcare organizations increasingly move applications to public clouds, many are considering migrating their Epic systems. Hosting Epic on a public cloud can help organizations tap into key cloud benefits, including scalability, availability, security, and access to innovative technology. By moving Epic to the cloud, organizations can streamline workflows and produce better patient outcomes while reducing the costs and complexity of managing an EHR system in-house.
Epic systems can be hosted on several public cloud platforms. But a strong partnership between Epic and Microsoft plus a widespread familiarity with Microsoft products among healthcare organizations have made Azure the right choice for a growing number of companies.
Is your organization considering migrating your Epic system to Azure? Understanding what Azure offers will help your organization thoroughly evaluate this cloud platform and start planning your migration.
The Power of Epic on Azure: Transforming Healthcare Delivery
Moving your Epic EHR system to Azure can have a transformative effect on your ability to deliver high-quality care to patients.
The benefits of hosting Epic on Azure
With Epic on Azure, your organization can realize several important cloud benefits, including:
Cost savings: With a cloud deployment, you can avoid large, upfront capital expenditures needed for running Epic in an on-premises data center. In addition, you can reduce costs for dev/test environments, disaster recovery systems, and other types of environments by moving them to Azure.
Efficiency: Moving from an on-premises deployment to the cloud also enables you to eliminate hardware maintenance and management tasks, so you can focus staff time on more strategic projects.
Availability: Using Azure for Epic enables you to capitalize on Azure’s capabilities for improving system availability while strengthening disaster recovery and business continuity. With Azure, you can spread your EHR system across multiple data centers to increase redundancy without substantially increasing costs.
Scalability: Azure enables you to quickly scale the cloud environment up—or down—to meet changing demand. You no longer have to guess about capacity and overpay for underutilized resources.
Security and compliance: Azure offers a full range of security services and monitoring tools to help you prevent data breaches, maintain data privacy, and comply with regulations. Meanwhile, you can relinquish all responsibility for physical data center security to Azure.
Innovation: With Epic on Azure, you can take advantage of numerous leading technologies available as Azure services, including AI and natural language processing services, analytics, process workflow tools, and more.
Elevating EHR Security: Safeguarding Patient Data
Azure offers numerous security technologies to protect sensitive data—including advanced technologies that might be too expensive or complex for small or midsized organizations to implement in on-premises Epic deployments.
Azure security measures
By employing a shared responsibility model for security, Azure can help you safeguard your Epic environment and all of its protected health information (PHI). To secure the application and data, you can take advantage of multi-factor authentication, data encryption, role-based access control, AI-based monitoring, and other services from Azure. Meanwhile, Azure secures the infrastructure and operating system, as well as the physical data centers.
Compliance certification
Azure can help you adhere to HIPAA regulations and achieve HITRUST certification, which enables you to demonstrate your compliance with HIPAA and other regulations. Microsoft provides guidance about how Azure services map to compliance domains and controls. And importantly, you can inherit controls from Azure’s HITRUST-certified services and apply them to your own HITRUST certification.
Accelerating Innovation: Driving Value Creation
By deploying the Epic EHR system on Azure, you can access a range of technologies that can help improve patient care and accelerate your delivery of innovative services. Some of those technologies are available through the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which integrates capabilities from Azure and other Microsoft platforms.
Enhance patient care, generate insights, and streamline workflows
Using Azure services and additional Microsoft capabilities can help you develop new ways to enhance patient care. For example, you could create more personalized experiences for patients that keep them better engaged with their healthcare. And you could offer interactive virtual health encounters, with high-quality audio, video, and screen sharing capabilities.
Combining Azure services with Epic capabilities can help you generate new healthcare insights. For instance, you can employ Azure Health Data Services and Text Analytics for health to bring together data from multiple sources and then apply predictive analytics to spot clinical trends.
At the same time, you can streamline healthcare workflows. Microsoft services can help you facilitate collaboration among clinical teams, allowing clinicians to more easily share information. You can also enable remote patient monitoring to provide continuous care to patients and reduce the need for some in-person visits or hospital readmissions.
Harnessing AI for Improved Outcomes
In 2023, Epic and Microsoft deepened their partnership by integrating the Azure OpenAI service with Epic’s software. This co-innovation project focuses on the use of generative AI (GenAI) with Epic. But it could also be an important first step in realizing the full power of AI for healthcare, in particular by enhancing clinical decision making and generating new insights from health records.
Enhance clinical decision making
AI has enormous potential to assist clinicians in making medical decisions. Some AI-based decision-support systems are already in place. For example, rule-based expert systems, which employ a simple form of AI, analyze data by applying rules created by human experts. These systems can use symptoms, observed signs, and test results to present potential diagnoses and treatment recommendations.
Meanwhile, organizations are exploring clinical decision-making applications for machine learning, which continuously optimize models as more data is ingested. Machine learning systems can help predict disease outcomes and enable clinicians to develop more personalized treatment plans. And natural language processing capabilities can help extract data from clinical notes within EHRs to accelerate information searches or fuel AI-based decision making.
Unlock insights and enhance efficiency
The partnership between Microsoft and Epic will help healthcare providers generate new, evidence-based care insights from EHR information. GenAI capabilities could also help clinicians enhance productivity by rapidly summarizing notes or assisting with coding and billing. Providers could also use AI capabilities to predict patient flow, which could in turn help optimize resource allocation.
Planning Your Epic-on-Azure Transformation
Migrating your Epic environment to Azure can be a large project—one that promises important benefits to your organization but also carries significant risks. To reduce those risks and improve your odds of success, you should carefully evaluate deployment options, develop a clear plan, and consider partnering with outside experts.
Evaluate deployment options
When deciding to move forward with Epic on Azure, you have several deployment options. For example, you might decide to first use Azure as part of your disaster recovery strategy for Epic. You could alternatively host other non-production environments on Azure. Or you could migrate your entire Epic production environment to Azure. You’ll also have a range of technical options and pricing models to consider as you move farther along with your planning.
Develop a migration plan
No matter what type of deployment you choose first, having a detailed plan in place is essential. You might begin by assessing the skills of your internal resources: Does your team have cloud infrastructure, networking, and security skills? If not, you’ll need to fill gaps before getting started.
When planning the actual migration, a phased process is often the best way to mitigate risks. Even if you have decided to move your entire Epic environment to Azure, you could start small. For example, beginning with discrete, non-production components of the platform—such as training, or disaster recovery—could give your team experience working with native cloud services and ultimately improve your likelihood of success for the entire migration.
You should also define your strategy for protecting data, both during the migration and after. For example, your team will need to have access control and encryption capabilities in place early to prevent any exposure of sensitive data.
Tap into guidance—and partner with experts
Microsoft can provide guidance, best practices, and reference architectures for how to deploy an Epic system on Azure—and how best to pursue other healthcare use cases on the cloud. But many organizations will benefit from partnering with outside experts. Consultants and managed service providers (MSPs) with cloud and healthcare expertise can often help accelerate migration projects and reduce risks. Some also offer solutions and services for Epic systems on Azure that address specific use cases.
These outside firms can also help simplify management once migration is complete. The right provider can help you manage the Epic technical infrastructure, continuously monitor cloud security, and navigate Azure’s business model, so you can control costs.
Real-World Success Stories: Epic on Azure in Action
Several prominent healthcare organizations have successfully migrated their Epic systems to Azure over the past few years. For example:
- Mount Sinai Health System migrated its on-premises Epic environment to Azure in an effort to improve scalability and availability while reducing data center management burdens. The organization gained the agility to adjust for changing demand, eliminated EHR system outages, and refocused internal staff on innovation.
- St. Luke’s University Health Network migrated 20 Epic environments to Azure. The move provided the scalability and agility that St. Luke’s needs to accommodate the acquisition of new organizations.
- Samaritan Health Services decided to migrate Epic systems to Azure as part of a broader digital transformation strategy. The organization began with a disaster recovery deployment. Subsequently, Samaritan moved its production environment to Azure. As a result, the organization has modernized EHR management, boosted agility and flexibility for managing patient data, and reduced the costs associated with running on-premises infrastructure.
Embracing Epic on Azure
Migrating Epic EHR systems to Azure can produce significant benefits for healthcare organizations. Still, these migration projects can be daunting, especially given how vital EHR systems are for healthcare organizations. Once your organization has decided to move forward with migration, your team should develop a clear, multi-phased plan.
An external organization or managed service provider (MSP) can help guide you through a successful migration. Collaborating with that organization for ongoing management can help you make the most of Azure services while controlling the costs and resources required for managing your environment.
Ready to start building your Epic to Azure migration plan? Cloudticity can help. Contact us for a free consultation.
