Jefferson Health modernizes as it migrates on-premises Epic environment to Azure

Tell us about your decision to migrate to the cloud—where are you in the process, and why Microsoft Azure?

We’re migrating the Epic electronic health records and its ecosystem to Microsoft Azure. We're doing so for three key reasons—to ensure business agility, to get increasing knowledge from our data, and to mitigate risk. Microsoft has already proven to be an excellent partner for Jefferson, our data warehouse is already on Azure. In addition, Microsoft works with Epic to support their customers’ migration of Epic environments to Azure.

Additionally, Azure's reference architecture was purpose-built for Epic, enabling it to be more resilient and scalable. So, Azure was the right choice for us. We also worked with Accenture, a Microsoft Cloud Partner Program member, to utilize the potential of Azure’s compute capabilities to connect Epic with other systems such as imaging labs.

What is your biggest challenge?

Jefferson Health has grown to 18 hospitals, a university, and a payor through a series of mergers. Our focus is to deliver value at scale in the most timely, cost-effective manner possible. Once the migration of Epic to Azure is complete, we will be able to add workloads seamlessly and it will help facilitate the transfer of large datasets making it easier for our clinicians to access critical information.

What specific value will you get from modernizing and moving to the cloud?

First, is elasticity, business agility. The majority of our hospitals currently use Epic. Epic and our other workloads have been installed on-premises over the course of time. The move to Azure will help in the migration of the remaining facilities into Epic. As we go forward, it's likely that we will need to bring other hospitals into Epic, and we want to be agile in scaling out our infrastructure.

Second, we immediately gain enhanced resiliency, disaster recovery, business continuity advantages. As we install on the Azure instance, we are implementing contemporary information security controls, hardening systems, data encryption.

Third, it’s important to reduce complexity. We know moving to the cloud will help us do that. We're always going to have some on-premises requirement too. With Azure, we can maintain both. This again translates to business agility. There's artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning capability in Azure and we know we can turn it on and leverage it in short order.

Overall, we further our mission, deliver business agility, mitigate risk, and gain better insight into data. 

How does Epic on Azure support your mission?

Our mission is to improve lives. We are healthcare providers and a center for research and education. First, and foremost, we need a stable, robust foundation and need to deliver high up time. We also need to think about Epic applications and how we use them. Epic offers multiple functions related to patient care, like scheduling and registration, and clinical systems for physicians, nurses, emergency staff, and other care providers. It supports billing systems for insurers and other systems for pharmacists, lab technologists, and radiologists. Azure gives us the foundation to enhance, scale, and unify all of this—and easily add advanced features to it. It will streamline how our physicians and researchers work and that translates to even better patient care. This creates a virtuous cycle that builds on itself in full support of our goals.

What about Azure makes you confident you’re getting the level of security and privacy that you need?

We did our due diligence. We did significant research. We have our own history and experience with Microsoft, and we’ve seen what Microsoft delivers. We also have a good sense of the market. And this connected architecture, made possible by the working relationship between Microsoft, Accenture, and Epic allows for the development of innovative tools and services to help keep Epic on Azure secure, compliant, and responsive. We use Microsoft Defender, so we’re getting that endpoint detection and response. We have confidence in Microsoft as a robust security provider.

How will AI play a part in modernization at Jefferson Health?

AI and machine learning will help accelerate our journey. We think innovation follows investment, and in our case the investment in the public cloud. We are at the beginning of our migration, but if you carry forward that line of thinking, what it does is set us up to unlock advanced features, AI, machine learning, everything else, we'll be able to simply able to turn on in the cloud when we’re ready. The time to value is decreased substantially.

What are you most excited about moving forward?

What’s exciting is that Jefferson Health will be first or second of our scale on a public cloud provider for the Epic Ecosystem. Technology is important, but equally important is the working relationship. When you're first a pioneer, and we do consider ourselves a pioneer, you want to work with other innovators. We know we're going to encounter things, unknowns, we know we're going to need to pivot, and we also want to expand in innovation. We’re excited about continuing to work with Microsoft—it’s a partnership that will help us do all of that.

Learn more about Jefferson Health on its website, on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Epic® is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corporation.