THE PROJECT
Context and Drivers
Following the completion of an SC:Strategy engagement with the Northern Care Alliance, Shaping Cloud were engaged directly by Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust in order to further one of our key recommendations. Our view was that their Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system, Allscripts Sunrise Clinical Manager (SCM), would be a strong candidate for migration to Microsoft Azure.
Shaping Cloud were asked to demonstrate the viability and running costs for migrating the current version of Allscripts SCM to Microsoft Azure which would include test, development, training and live environments as working entities on Microsoft Azure. The outcome of the project would be a fully tested and signed off version of AllScripts running in Azure
This project was identified as a major initiative within Salford’s Global Digital Exemplar programme and required close collaboration between Shaping loud, Microsoft, AllScripts and Salford themselves.
Solution
In order to successfully migrate this service to Microsoft Azure Shaping Cloud undertook our SC:Transform offering, which delivered:
- Planning, communication and engagement with Allscripts to define the migration approach and ensure support is available throughout
- A detailed analysis on the infrastructure and application services associated with the Allscripts SCM application
- A defined migration approach, with detailed architecture documents created for the end state solution design and a detailed project plan for the delivery of the end state solution.
- A Proof Of Concept (POC) migration on a subset of SCM data.
- An understanding of cloud service costs based on Microsoft Azure and the detailed bill of materials resulting from the design documentation.
Outcomes
The board agreed that a full production roll-out of SCM in Azure should form part of the road-map within the new Alliance’s IT Strategy and the POC also acted as excellent training exercise for the current Salford IT team as they for a real hands-on experience of what migrating to Azure entails and the possibilities it creates for them to deliver a far higher level of service.

Northen Care Alliance
CIO The Penine Acute Hospital NHS Trust, Northen Care Alliance
Working with Shaping Cloud was an enlightening experience.
Working with Shaping Cloud was an enlightening experience. They brought new ideas, they’re good listeners, they gave good quality feedback. They were very keen to talk to the right types of people in the organisation, not just the technicians. They came to us with a lot of knowledge. They were coming will to learn about hoe they could best help us as well as the first thing that comes to mind was professionalism of the presentation actually - you get a good strong documentation at the end.