University of California San Diego Health on Monday announced that it is putting its Epic electronic health record in the cloud.

The transition from managing its own on-premise Epic EHR to a cloud-based service has already involved moving some 10,000 workstations and integrating more than 100 third-party apps with Epic’s cloud, UC San Diego Health said.

[Also: Hospital datacenters: Extinct in 5 years?]

While hospitals and health systems have historically been somewhat tentative about mass migrations to the cloud, industry luminaries such as Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center John Halamka, MD, have been making bold predictions of late about datacenters vanishing as hospitals go the cloud for analytics, EHRs and clinical decision support. Halamka, for one, backed that claim up by placing 7 petabytes of BIDMC data on Amazon’s cloud.

UC San Diego Health, for its part, said the move is an early milestone in its three-year plan to migrate all of its data storage needs to the cloud -- not just Epic’s hosting environment, of course, though they have yet to divulge other clouds.

UC San Diego Health Associate Chief Information Officer Mark Amey said shifting to Epic’s cloud enables the hospital system and its clinics to be more agile and responsive while maintaining disaster recovery capabilities.

“By creating greater operational efficiencies,” Amey said, “we can invest more time and resources in patient care.”

UC San Diego also said that in November it will start sharing the new EHR with UC Irvine Health.