Mount Sinai remains at the cutting edge of medicine with Epic on Microsoft Azure

The Mount Sinai Health System, one of New York City’s largest academic medical systems, provides groundbreaking research to help solve medicine’s most complex challenges. Their internationally acclaimed hospitals innovate across a range of specialties, and their leading medical school educates the next generation of healthcare professionals. Keeping community at the heart of their mission, their diverse patient population from across New York’s five boroughs, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida rely on Mount Sinai for everything from routine doctors’ visits to specialty care—in their everyday lives and in their greatest times of need.

Mount Sinai relies on electronic health records (EHRs) to equip their providers, researchers, and educators with the most up-to-date patient data. EHRs increase clinician and care team collaboration by linking patient data across workloads to tools that help them make better predictions, enabling them to achieve the insights that save lives. For years now, Mount Sinai’s EHR of choice has been an on-premises Epic environment. With Epic, their 7,300 physicians can access data in real-time to foster the collaboration that drives the organization. Recognizing Epic’s significant role in operations, Mount Sinai weighs their digital strategy carefully and thoughtfully.

Outages challenged their data centers and EHR

Over time, Mount Sinai began to experience impactful outages that challenged their on-premises EHR. When they investigated, they realized that these were the result of various underlying data center infrastructure elements, which were complex and time-consuming to fix. Managing these elements pulled hospital resources away from innovation as staff devoted more time to system maintenance and less to improvements, decreasing the system’s ability to adopt new technologies and slowing the pace of research. “Our vision is to deliver transformational technology to drive innovation and optimize services, while improving the experience of the communities we serve,“ says Kristin Myers, Chief Digital and Information Officer for Mount Sinai Health System. “These outages are not sustainable, and we must modernize our technology to better enable our mission and stay competitive.”

Myers saw an opportunity in this challenge. Because upgrading their on-premises hardware and facilities came with a high upfront cost and would require yearly investments, Mount Sinai turned their sights to the cloud. “We would need to spend tens of millions of dollars to get our datacenters up to speed,” says Joseph Gimigliano, Chief Technology Officer for Mount Sinai Health System. “What we recognized was that this was a pivotal moment for us—there were better options.” They were already running hundreds of other healthcare workloads in Azure, and they’d seen its value firsthand. To remain at the forefront of innovation, Mount Sinai decided to migrate their Epic workloads to Azure.

Microsoft and Accenture partner to bring Mount Sinai to the Microsoft Azure Cloud

Mount Sinai partnered with Accenture, a leader in cloud migration services and deep Epic implementation experience, and Microsoft, whose healthcare-first approach to the cloud resonated with Mount Sinai. Microsoft has a strong track record of fostering the healthcare community—they facilitate data collaboration across organizations by making it easier for hospitals to securely share their data. This data sharing can improve patient outcomes and population health, and it also enriches research by combining data from disparate sources and connecting it to the latest Microsoft AI and analytics technologies.

Focused on delivery, Accenture harnessed Azure’s powerful compute capabilities and connected Epic to other systems, such as imaging and labs. This integration allows clinicians to access larger datasets and transfer them easily between providers and hospitals. Underpinning Accenture’s work was Azure’s reference architecture, which was purpose-built for Epic and allowed it to be more resilient and scalable. Moreover, the close collaboration between Microsoft and Epic allowed the organizations to proactively build the most cutting-edge tools and services to keep Epic on Azure secure, compliant, and responsive.

Mount Sinai realized the collaboration between Microsoft and Epic made Azure the best fit for their organization. “When you think about all of the ancillary applications that make up the healthcare ecosystem, that played a major role in our decision,” says Gimigliano. “Moreover, the work that Microsoft is doing to take the data within those systems and facilitate solutions that foster the healthcare community gave it the edge.” Aligned on a plan, Mount Sinai and Accenture brought their Epic on Azure journey to life. 

Sharpening the cutting edge of innovation

Today, Mount Sinai has migrated many of their workloads to Azure and are continuing to do so. By the end of summer 2023, they’ll have the largest production instance of Epic running in Azure in the world, and by early 2024, their migration of non-Epic applications will be largely complete. The transition has had less disruptions than typical, in no small part due to Accenture’s experience running Azure migrations and their pre-developed implementation templates.

Mount Sinai is already seeing the benefits. They’re more nimble and can contract or expand as demand for healthcare services requires, helping them use their resources more efficiently. They’ve eliminated their outages since they’re no longer having to manage the various infrastructure elements in their data centers, allowing their IT team to realize the value of innovation faster. To this end, they’ve been able to focus on driving sustainability initiatives—using the Microsoft Sustainability Dashboard, they can measure the reduction of their carbon footprint as they vacate their on-premises data centers.

Once in full production, they expect to see a host of other improvements. “We believe this paradigm shift in how we operate as an organization will address our resilience and scalability needs, enable greater predictability of costs, and give us the flexibility to expand or contract as fast as we need,” says Gimigliano. “It’s a model that aligns more closely with how our organization operates, especially when you consider situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Their clinical systems will also be more resilient to other kinds of unforeseen events, like cyberattacks or natural disasters, helping enable HIPAA compliance even in outages. They can contribute data more easily to their data lake and adopt artificial intelligence and machine learning models to seamlessly utilize the latest healthcare technologies. And patients will benefit from a more streamlined and connected experience, improving their satisfaction, safety, and treatment. Mount Sinai is more resilient and flexible with Epic on Azure—helping them remain at the cutting edge of medicine to deliver innovative care to New York and beyond.