St. Luke’s uses Azure NetApp Files for robust, flexible performance of Epic health records

St. Luke’s University Health Network is a healthcare provider with a regional, nonprofit network of 18,000 employees providing services to approximately 1 million patients at 14 campuses and more than 300 outpatient sites. Its innovative spirit earned all its network hospitals a top-tier Stage 7 designation from HIMSS Analytics in recognition of extensive and creative use of EHRs to improve service, boost quality, and make care more affordable.

Moving to a cloud-first computing model has been an essential piece of St. Luke’s digital transformation, and the organization chose Azure as its trusted cloud platform. Through careful planning and a phased approach, it successfully migrated its entire EHR infrastructure to Azure. However, during its journey to the cloud St. Luke’s experienced performance issues both with its Citrix servers and with its nearly 8-terabyte Clarity database used for EHR reporting.

Many clinicians and providers run EHR reports daily, so optimal performance is essential. “Epic is the most important application we have for our clinicians and providers, so we have to make sure we’re continually delivering superior performance and uptime reliability,” says Matt Woodruff, Systems Architect at St. Luke’s University Health Network.

Bringing scalable performance to Clarity on Azure

St. Luke’s chose Azure NetApp Files as part of its Azure-based EHR architecture to gain the functionality it lacked with standard share files. It uses Azure NetApp Files as the underlying shared file storage service for running the performance-intensive and latency-sensitive EHR analytics and end user desktop workloads in the cloud. “Having the performance and reliability of Azure NetApp Files means we can better support our organization, providers, and patients,” explains Chris Brutschea, Associate Chief Information Officer at St. Luke’s University Health Network.

The organization needed to migrate the large Clarity analytical database to Azure quickly enough to catch up on the transaction logs. It used Azure NetApp Files to copy an on-premises database from three different servers to an Azure virtual machine within four days. “Without the performance of Azure NetApp Files as the conduit for migrating this database workload to Azure, we would have struggled to transfer such a large database and get it synced and ready for production so quickly,” says Woodruff.

St. Luke’s also used Azure NetApp Files to migrate all its FSLogix profiles for Citrix to Azure. “Azure NetApp Files was critical to making our whole game plan come together,” says Woodruff. “Without its simplicity and performance, running 11,000 concurrent Citrix sessions would be much more complicated and challenging—and we’ve had no performance issues whatsoever.”

Azure NetApp Files has three performance tiers, which allows St. Luke’s to scale performance up or down with a click of a button. “Having that flexibility is vital for us,” says Woodruff. “There’s no downtime or impact to the business.”

The St. Luke’s team enjoyed working with the Microsoft and Azure NetApp Files teams, which were always quick to answer any questions and provide assistance. “Our experience with them was extremely positive, and we have peace of mind knowing they’re always there if we need help,” notes Woodruff.

Realizing cost savings and driving innovation

St. Luke’s successful EHR migration from on-premises to Azure removes much of the complexity associated with its previous environment. "With Azure we are gaining greater compute capabilities, and through Azure NetApp Files better storage on a fast network for 25 percent less than when we ran it on-premises,” says Chad Brisendine, Chief Information Officer at St. Luke’s University Health Network, which helps the organization deliver on its mission of bringing high-quality care to patients at a lower cost.

And now that the EHR system is more accessible, St. Luke’s can move faster as an organization. “We're innovating faster since our move to Azure using Azure NetApp Files. We removed layers of complexity, which allows us to bring new capabilities to the organization more rapidly," Brisendine says. 

By using Azure NetApp Files, St. Luke’s has the reliable performance and uptime it needs for Clarity. 

“Keeping our clinicians and providers happy when they use Epic translates to better patient care,” says Woodruff, adding that this is central to St. Luke’s mission of providing high-quality care at a lower cost. “Because Clarity performs well and is now more reliable thanks to Azure NetApp Files, clinicians and providers can focus on the patient. That’s what matters most here at St. Luke’s.”

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Epic is a trademark of Epic Systems Corporation.