REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft Corp. this week announced that Epic clients, starting with Mount Sinai Health System (Mount Sinai), one of New York City’s largest academic medical systems, can use Microsoft Azure Large Instances, a solution designed to achieve the scale needed to run the large Epic electronic health record (EHR) database — up to 50 million database accesses per second.

Azure Large Instances leverages dedicated resources, which allows Mount Sinai and other Epic clients to scale beyond the previous limits of shared public cloud infrastructure solutions.

Through close collaboration with Accenture, Mount Sinai continues to migrate many of its workloads to Azure and now has the largest production instance of Epic running on Azure in the world. “We are very excited about this move as it further enables digital transformation, accelerates artificial intelligence (AI) and innovation, provides scalability and flexibility, and reduces upfront infrastructure costs, ultimately leading to improved care and discovery as well as streamlined operations,” said Kristin Myers, executive vice president, chief digital and information officer, and dean for digital and information technology at Mount Sinai.

At the core of health care provider organizations and care delivery is the EHR, a real-time, patient-centered record that contains the medical and treatment history of a patient, giving providers a broad view of a patient’s care.

As health care organizations manage an increasingly complex care landscape and challenging economic conditions, there is a growing desire to consolidate and exit on-premises data centers and build for further innovation.

“Going through this digital transformation requires partners who understand our health system’s mission and the criticality of patient care,” said Joseph Gimigliano, chief technology officer at Mount Sinai. Microsoft’s long-standing collaboration with Epic includes enabling the migration of Epic EHR environments to Azure through ongoing joint testing and engineering.