Mishawaka, Ind.-based Franciscan Health is saving $45 million over five years by migrating Epic to the Microsoft cloud.
The 12-hospital system transitioned its EHR to Azure Virtual Services in May 2024, cutting infrastructure costs by a third and boosting application response time by 50%.
“We run our operations on Epic,” Franciscan Health CIO Charles Wagner said in a Nov. 18 Microsoft news release. “If Epic is down, we don’t have access to clinical data. We don’t have access to pharmacy; we don’t have access to lab results. So, from the minute that’s down, patient care is at risk. It costs us $10 million to $12 million a day every day we’re down.”
Since the change, Franciscan has improved its disaster recovery environment go-live time from between 8 and 12 hours to under an hour. The health system can also launch new systems within 30 minutes, and is working toward a disaster recovery period of less than 72 hours.
