Can this tightly-regulated industry really make the shift?
Access to electronic health records
Tool to book, cancel, or change their appointments
Ability to make prescription refill requests
A recent article made a bold prediction: Healthcare data centers will be “extinct in five years.”4 While some are skeptical that the industry can move this quickly, others believe that it’s entirely possible. In any event, the migration has already—at least partially—begun.
Replacing hardware and software can be expensive—especially if you’re considering investments that might be out-of-date in just a few years. Using the cloud frees up those resources and allows organizations to pay only for what they use. It also opens up valuable real estate in hospital buildings that may already be tight on space.
For facilities located in areas prone to disasters (hurricanes, floods, earthquakes), the cloud can prevent loss of critical health data in the event of property or infrastructure damage.
As the volume of health data and usage of applications grow, a healthcare IT team using the cloud can rapidly expand services without needing to acquire new hardware— and then scale back if necessary.
A quick internet search turns up dozens of articles proclaiming cloud to be even more secure than on premise. It’s true: Trusted, hosted cloud companies often have more resources/technology, expertise, and time to focus on security than organizations with competing priorities, a shortage of staff, and tight budgets. Of course, it’s still important to oversee security closely—just as you would with an on-premise data center.
In healthcare, today’s most popular strategy is to use a mix of on-premise, private, and third-party public cloud services.7 This hybrid model allows IT leaders to control certain data and applications more tightly than others. Take for instance, image data like X-rays and MRIs. They’re considered protected health information under HIPAA, need to be accessed frequently, and use up a lot of bandwidth, so they might be better managed in-house.