Case Study

Samaritan Health and Sapphire Health deploy Epic Production environment in Microsoft Azure

Corvallis, OR, December 10, 2023

Sapphire Health announced the successful deployment of Samaritan Health’s Epic production electronic medical record (EMR) environment on Microsoft Azure. The production deployment is a further expansion of Samaritan Health’s EHR cloud strategy – Samaritan Health deployed their EHR disaster recovery environment with Sapphire Health on Azure in late 2022. Sapphire Health partnered with Samaritan Health resources on the deployment and was able to go-live within 6 months of project initiation.

“Leveraging the cloud for our Epic workloads affords us flexibility we don’t have on prem,” says Scott Morris, AVP of Infrastructure at Samaritan Health. “Partnering with Sapphire Health to deploy our EMR production environment in Azure is setting us up for success with future growth and technology adoption.”

Core benefits:

• Resiliency and Availability.  Azure has multiple regions across the United States (and the globe) and data center redundancy within each region. Azure infrastructure is highly available, helping Samaritan Health ensure business continuity.

• Azure offers powerful compute performance that is capable of handling all of Samaritan’s Epic workloads. Samaritan will not need to worry about refreshing their Epic hardware again and always be on the latest chipset.
• Cost Flexibility. Azure services offer flexible pricing structures in which Samaritan Health only pay for the services and usage that they need, resulting in potential significant cost savings, especially for the DR and non-production environments.
• Samaritan can scale Azure resource up and down as needed to allow for future growth and expansion without expensive capital purchases.

“We were long aware of the power and value of leveraging the cloud for our EHR workloads,” says Sonney Sapra, CIO of Samaritan Health. “We were excited to find a partner in Sapphire Health that combined EHR and cloud expertise to help us along our cloud migration journey.”

About Sapphire Health
Sapphire Health supports healthcare organizations with a team of seasoned healthcare IT professionals to modernize and secure their infrastructure. Sapphire Health can assist with all aspects of planning, design, and execution for Epic platform and cloud migrations, infrastructure automation and optimization, IT managed services, and business continuity and resiliency.