Epic Systems and Microsoft have had a long-standing partnership, but have since expanded their alliance as they look to develop and integrate generative AI into their products, as well as make Microsoft's cloud platform compatible with running the large EHR system.
On Aug. 10, Microsoft said its Azure Large Instances, the company's cloud infrastructure, would be able to run Epic clients' databases.
The application, according to the company, can run up to 50 million database accesses per second, and is designed to help healthcare customers achieve the scale needed to run Epic's EHR system.
Currently, New York City-based Mount Sinai is the largest production instance of Epic running on Azure.
Microsoft is also collaborating with Epic on generative artificial intelligence that is tailored to the healthcare industry.
On April 17, Epic said it would work with Microsoft to develop and integrate generative AI into its EHR software.
The two have been training Microsoft's Azure OpenAI on a large collection of information so it can asynchronously draft responses to patient messages for providers.
This integration will allow Azure OpenAI to provide draft messages to providers, who can then review the message and make any modifications before it is sent to a patient.
The aim of the integration is to reduce the documentation burden on providers that significantly grew during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The tool is already being piloted by health systems such as UC San Diego Health; Madison, Wis.-based UW Health; Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care; and Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health.