Executive summary

NexJ Health needed to cut cloud costs, simplify deployments, and scale efficiently, driving their move to Microsoft Azure’s modern, scalable platform.

NexJ Health chose Microsoft Azure for its scalable, cost-efficient cloud services, using Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure AI services, and Azure Landing Zones to migrate and modernize infrastructure, streamline deployments, and enhance performance.

NexJ Health cut hosting costs by 35%, reduced deployment time by 25%, and achieved 100% uptime in the U.S., enabling faster feature delivery, improved reliability, and greater focus on innovation.

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In the complex and rapidly evolving world of digital healthcare, NexJ Health stands out as a transformative force. Through its platform, NexJ Connected Wellness, the company provides AI-enabled health coaching for polychronic condition management and mental wellbeing as an advanced primary health service.

Before migrating to Azure, NexJ Health knew they needed to explore ways to improve technical and operational inadequacies to stay competitive in the market as a leading AI-enabled platform for behavior change. Their deployment pipeline was convoluted, with infrastructure maintenance demanding significant internal resources, and cloud hosting costs that were unreasonably high. Maintaining excess infrastructure to handle user load spikes resulted in inefficiencies, limiting NexJ Health’s ability to innovate and serve customers effectively.

“Our platform deployments were long and complex,” said Sabina Girard, Director of Technology and Chief Privacy Officer at NexJ Health. “This, along with high hosting costs, was reducing our ability to quickly deliver features that our clients needed and limited our capacity to evolve our platform to meet future needs and goals.”

For a solution, NexJ Health turned to Microsoft Azure, enabling the company to modernize its technology, streamline operations, and expand its impact.

Migration and modernization with Microsoft Azure

To overcome their challenges, NexJ Health partnered with Optimus Information Inc. to modernize NexJ Health’s infrastructure by utilizing key Azure services. By securing Microsoft funding through Azure Migrate and Modernize, they were able to leverage Azure’s scalable and cost-efficient cloud platform to rapidly deploy core workloads and ensure a strict level of privacy compliance, essential in healthcare. Azure Migrate and Modernize provides a pathway to building an AI-ready infrastructure by securely migrating and modernizing on-premises environments to Azure. The offer provides access to Microsoft experts and top specialized partners, along with incentives to help offset migration costs and built-in security guidance at every stage.

“Our migration was so seamless that customers didn’t notice the change,” said Girard. “The Optimus Information team’s support allowed us to confidently and securely migrate our infrastructure with minimal downtime.”

Key Azure technologies that were integrated into NexJ Health’s platform included:

  • Azure AI Foundry: Powered NexJ Health’s emerging extensible agentic AI capabilities to deliver personalized experiences while keeping human coaches in the loop.
  • Power BI and Microsoft Fabric: Delivered advanced analytics and insights, improving health coaching protocol efficiency and program effectiveness.
  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): Enabled containerized deployments and autoscaling, reducing costs and increasing uptime.
  • Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Enhanced security posture for handling sensitive healthcare data.
  • Azure Landing Zones: Designed using Microsoft best practices to optimize for scalability, governance, and performance.

Measuring the impact for customers and employees

The transformation yielded significant benefits across the board:

  • 35% reduction in hosting costs by using autoscaling in Azure Kubernetes Service.
  • 25% faster deployment cycles, allowing NexJ Health to move from biweekly to weekly feature releases.
  • 100% uptime in the U.S. instance of the platform throughout 2024.
  • Improved employee productivity, with technical staff now focused on innovation instead of infrastructure maintenance.
  • Enhanced customer satisfaction, thanks to improved reliability, faster feature delivery, and better user experiences.

NexJ Health customers now benefit from a more stable, responsive, and cost-effective platform that delivers personalized, AI-powered health coaching and adapts to individual needs while maintaining the vital human connection.

More AI-Powered growth and deeper personalization

NexJ Health is accelerating its AI vision with a extensible agentic AI platform that personalizes care and automates tasks while keeping human coaches at the core. Powered by Azure AI Foundry, including GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1-nano and text-embedding from Azure OpenAI in Azure AI Foundry Models, Azure AI Search, Azure AI Services, and PII detection in Azure AI Content Safety, the future of NexJ Health’s Connected Wellness platform is leveraging Microsoft’s continued innovations in AI models, tools, and trust. “Using Microsoft Azure strengthens every aspect of our work,” said Girard. “It helps us innovate faster, deliver better outcomes, and expand access to advanced healthcare.”

Looking ahead, NexJ Health is well-positioned to accelerate its cloud and AI adoption by leveraging Azure Migrate and Modernize or Azure Innovate, a Microsoft offer that enables AI-led transformation. These offers provide comprehensive resources and expert support from Microsoft, empowering the organization to enhance agility, drive innovation, and implement solutions with greater efficiency.

Discover more on the NexJ Health website or LinkedIn and learn more about our partner on, Optimus Information Inc.’s website or LinkedIn page.

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