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Proving clinical systems perform in Azure for the NHS

Allscripts is a healthcare IT company that offers electronic health record (EHR) and practice management solutions to enhance healthcare delivery. Their products aim to improve clinical, financial, and operational efficiencies across hospitals, health systems, and physician practices, fostering better health outcomes and coordinated care.

The Problem

Following a strategy engagement with Shaping Cloud, Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust (now the Northern Care Alliance) wanted to test the performance, cost, and viability of Microsoft Azure with one of its most challenging clinical systems: Electronic Patient Record system, Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager (SCM).

The project was identified as a major initiative within Salford’s Global Digital Exemplar programme and required close collaboration between Shaping Cloud, Microsoft, Allscripts and the NHS Trust.

The Solution

In order to successfully migrate this critical clinical system to Microsoft Azure, Shaping Cloud undertook a detailed analysis of the infrastructure and application services associated with Allscripts SCM. Being 2017, Shaping Cloud had only its own experience from which to refer. Thankfully, we had already migrated many business critical applications in other sectors.

Drawing on this experience and considering afresh the unique challenges and requirements of a clinical system within the NHS, this assessment set a standard for migrating clinical workloads to the cloud - ensuring all dependencies were thoroughly understood to ensure the migrated solution operated as intended and ensuring the final solution was compliant and clinically safe.

Designs and testing plans were all signed off by clinical app provider, Microsoft, and NHS before final implementation.

The Outcome

The board and Allscripts agreed that a full production roll-out of Allscripts SCM in Azure should form part of the road-map within the new Alliance’s IT strategy, with the proof of concept acting as an excellent training exercise for the NHS Trust IT team - providing them with hands-on experience of migrating to Azure and inspiring them with the possibilities it creates for them and the Trust.

Allscripts went on to deploy their product to Azure to create their SaaS version of the product for other healthcare customers to consume.

“The results of the POC project provided both a clear understanding of the design and a high degree of confidence in the suitability of Microsoft Azure technology to host Allscripts SCM.”

Salford Royal NHS Trust board report