As the healthcare industry continues to move toward cloud-based services and technology, providers are exploring migrations of their electronic health record applications to public cloud environments, where advantages include lower costs, improved flexibility and integration with new technologies.
Healthcare organizations using the EHR platform Epic can consider migrating to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, for everything from disaster recovery (DR) to a more complete hosting of their Epic production environments.
Given the importance of EHRs to healthcare providers’ overall operational capabilities, drawing on the planning expertise of a partner is critical, says Sam Baker, a business development manager for CDW focusing on Microsoft technologies in healthcare.
Baker notes that cloud deployment facilitates innovation and data interoperability by placing an EHR and its related data in proximity to advanced cloud-native tools such as Azure OpenAI and Microsoft Fabric.
DISCOVER: Microsoft Azure supports forward-looking IT strategies for healthcare.
This proximity accelerates the exploration, deployment and scaling of innovative approaches to solution development.
Baker says that this helps clients to foster a culture of innovation and enable the exploration of more evolved IT practices.
“Reliability, scalability, automation, cost optimization, security and access to new technology are among the primary benefits healthcare organizations will see by moving Epic to Azure,” he explains. “They can effectively scale in a financially optimized way. The infrastructure is available and waiting for them in an Azure data center.”
He points to DR as a significant area where moving to a cloud-based solution can provide multiple benefits for healthcare organizations.
“When you have DR infrastructure as part of the on-premises data center, you have a second data center, a very expensive insurance policy in the event you’re hit with a ransomware attack and you need to fail over,” he says.
By moving that DR infrastructure to the cloud, healthcare organizations can turn off that capacity.
“This means you’re not paying for what you’re not using. You can shut off that infrastructure and save substantial costs on your DR spending and DR infrastructure cost,” Baker says. “This ‘pilot light’ scenario is specifically enabled through the cloud and does exist on-prem.”
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