Can Cloud Computing Fix Healthcare ?
by Bill Burns on Oct 19, 2009
Last week in Phoenix, Hitachi Data Systems continued to define real world applications and approaches for the use of cloud computing infrastructures in today’s business environments at the recent Storage Networking World 2009.
Is this approach appropriate to health data? Getting into the virtual medical records space can be dangerous territory, given the potential for privacy breaches, among other issues. However, one of the greatest advantages of a “cloud” approach is that the network, server and security headaches that exist for locally-installed, legacy client/server systems is eliminated. Cost and poor usability have been cited as the biggest obstacles to adoption of health IT – especially Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems – and has resulted in problematically-low EHR adoption rates. Eliminating this cost, and the IT maintenance burdens that are often beyond the reach of small medical practices, clearly removes these significant roadblocks to EHR adoption.
Will it work, and is cloud-computing really the best way to go? Time will tell, but it certainly is a necessary consideration given the ability for web-based services to really improve on a system that’s in dire need of an overhaul.
What do you think of cloud-computing…can it help the country fix healthcare?
Comments (3 )
Tweets that mention Storage STAT » Blog Archive » Can Cloud Computing Fix Healthcare ? -- Topsy.com on 19 Oct 2009 at 1:25 pm
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kevin zhu on 06 Dec 2009 at 9:21 am
“cloud computing” is a hot topic in china. And we all know(working in china IT industry) Health care industry is the major industry that chinese government pay more attention on. do you have some solution base on cloud computing in Health care industry? your solution is focusing on HIS, PACS application?
thanks
kevin zhu
vanessa lew on 30 May 2010 at 10:54 am
Typically, both public and private healthcare providers lack expertise, experience and financial resources to build an adequate and HIPAA compliant data center for the archiving, short and long term storage of patient health information. I believe that cloud computing is the answer for those starting greenfield and looking to supplement their existing PHI strategy.
