St. Luke's delivers exceptional, scalable service for providers and patients with Epic on Azure

St. Luke's University Health Network, a 17,000-employee regional nonprofit system, needed to modernize IT infrastructure: its Epic healthcare system (about a quarter of IT operations) had run on-premises since 2015 and needed to support growth, scalability, and stronger security for millions of patient records. Starting in late 2020, St. Luke's migrated all 20 Epic environments to Azure in a phased approach, moving non-production, test, and training environments first, using Azure ExpressRoute for high-throughput data transfer, Azure NetApp Files for specialized storage, and Azure Backup for disaster recovery. All 20 of 20 Epic environments were successfully migrated, including production Epic cache databases as large as 28 terabytes; one architect copied all data from the East US region to North Central over the Microsoft backbone in about 18 hours, and the team can now provision capacity "with a click of a button" instead of waiting the three months previously needed to get quotes, procure hardware, and set it up.

Microsoft Azure is Microsoft's cloud AI platform, combining Azure Machine Learning and Azure OpenAI Service — the delivery channel for a large share of pharma's enterprise GPT deployments.

This sits in the Build stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the foundation-model labs and platforms pharma teams use to actually construct, train and generate the model or application.