New York City-based Mount Sinai, who has one of the largest production instances of Epic running on Microsoft's cloud, says the move has been able to reduce upfront infrastructure costs and accelerate the health system's integration of AI.
"We've managed to avoid significant investments required to maintain the facilities aspects of our data centers, as well as hardware refreshes of core infrastructure," Kristin Myers, executive vice president, chief digital and information officer, and dean for digital and information technology at Mount Sinai, told Becker's. "This gives us the flexibility to scale up or down at a lower cost and redirect capital dollars to best serve the organization."
The health system began transitioning its Epic EHR system to Microsoft Azure in June 2022 and is already seeing the payoff not only financially, but from a technological, security and innovation standpoint.
"From a technology perspective, we are able to improve the management of the Epic environment, scale and expand our computing resources easily, enable our clinicians to access patient records from anywhere at any time, reduce upfront costs from data centers and hardware, and enable improved data backup and disaster recovery mechanisms," Ms. Myers said.
From an innovation perspective, Ms. Myers said the move has helped accelerate innovation and integration of AI models, algorithms and solutions.
Mount Sinai has also been able to support real-time data updates and analytics, and utilize machine learning to create predictive models that are integrated in Epic to support clinical care.
Enhanced security controls is another area the cloud move has improved.
"Having a partner who continuously invests in maintaining an effective security posture is a great complement to our existing security team and program," Ms. Myers said.
With this, Mount Sinai said it is on track to complete its application migration to the cloud within three years, meaning all of its healthcare providers' applications will be moved to the cloud environment.