MICHIGAN MEDICINE
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“ When you move electronic health records to the cloud , you ’ re connecting it to all of the cloud ’ s products and services like large scale data fabric and data warehousing capabilities , that healthcare institutions don ’ t have the skills and capabilities to build on-prem .
“ We ’ ve all heard the buzz around generative AI ( Gen AI ), particularly in 2023 . By placing Epic in the cloud , we now set it next to things like Gen AI . This allows us to change how we deliver patient care and how we deliver a patient experience . By moving it into the cloud , we enable those broader suites of features and functionality that the cloud provides .”
Running Epic in the cloud also provides other benefits , particularly when it comes to scalability , to better meet the compute and storage needs of healthcare organisations . “ We ’ ve got about 14,000 users here at
Michigan Medicine ,” Calahan says . “ On a
Monday morning at 10AM , I ’ ve got about 14,000 users hitting our Epic system . But on Monday at 2AM , I might only have 1,000 . By moving things to the cloud , I have the ability to scale compute up and down in a very responsible way that I can ’ t do on-prem .”
Another benefit of moving Epic to the cloud is that it enables standardisation of compute infrastructure , providing cost efficiencies and better performance .
“ If you ’ re a healthcare organisation , every six months Epic comes and needs to do an upgrade . So then you get these surprise multimillion dollar infrastructure investments where you have to buy more compute and more storage , which is challenging from a budgeting perspective .
“ But from a technology perspective , what it means is your Epic environment , which is the most important application that you have within your healthcare system , has essentially been cobbled together over
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