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The Cloud Means Savings
The cost advantages that cloud computing offers are enticing, especially in a time when healthcare organizations are investing in robust computing technology as part of their plan to qualify for the federal government’s $20 billion-plus HITECH financial incentive programs for achieving Meaningful Use of electronic health records (EHRs).
With a cloud-based model, applications, storage and even computing power is hosted by a third-party publically or privately via the Internet. Gartner defines cloud computing as “a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to customers using Internet Technologies.” Because of the remote hosting cloud distinction, healthcare organizations can reduce their investment in infrastructure and technical support resources currently necessary to support local computing endeavors.
Another common cost benefit of the cloud is that healthcare organizations only pay for what they use. Instead of spending money on hardware upgrades or to increase storage capacity, healthcare organizations simply pay for added computing power when it is needed. As part of this scalable growth model, use of the cloud is treated as an operational expense versus a large upfront capital expense, which can be nearly impossible to get for many organizations.
The Cloud Means Accessibility
The cloud provides the chance for many healthcare organizations to leverage innovations that they otherwise would not be able to manage and access under their own management and budget. EHRs, for example, require fast servers with large storage capacity; these are requirements many small hospitals and physicians’ practices cannot support. With cloud computing, EHR hardware installation, data storage and application hosting are no longer the responsibility of the organization. Additionally, because the cloud is hosted via the Internet the EHR can be accessed anywhere. The access flexibility the cloud provides can bring significant improvement to physicians’ workflow, helping them to easily retrieve and record information.
The Cloud Means Opportunity
Beyond a cloud-based EHR there is tremendous opportunity for EHR supportive applications, such as speech recognition and decision-support, to move to the cloud as well. As seen with desktop-based EHRs, tools that accelerate or improve EHR adoption and utilization, such as speech recognition, are increasingly recognized as a must-have within this environment. In fact, there’s been a noticeable trend in healthcare IT vendor collaboration to ensure EHRs deliver industry-leading speech recognition as part of the package. To succeed, cloud vendors will need to support the industry’s demand for complementary, mission critical EHR applications.
With more information and resources in the cloud, healthcare providers will have the ability to more easily access the technology tools they need, as well as provide updates for their peers. Improved information and innovation will help drive a new level of medical intelligence, strengthening relations amongst referring physicians and improving the delivery of care for patients.
We’ll also see healthcare organizations begin to explore ways in which they can create and offer their own cloud-based applications. Cloud vendors already and will continue to provide application developers with new opportunities to easily access applications that they can then apply to mobile phones, workstations, iPads / tablets, and web applications. The sticking point here will be ease-of-access and integration simplicity, as well as a flexible pricing model.
The Future Cloud
While the application of the cloud to healthcare is in its early stages, continual growth is expected. The cloud provides the opportunity for millions of simultaneous users; it can process enormous bandwidth loads and with such strength in scalability it will be interesting to observe what other healthcare innovations will transpire. It’s here and it’s already making waves. Healthcare organizations will undoubtedly begin to adopt cloud-based applications across both public and private cloud models. While security remains a hot-button issue, healthcare organizations can find confidence in only using cloud-based platforms that offer HIPAA supportive security.
Today, we can’t look to the future of healthcare and not think about cloud computing. Increasingly the cloud will introduce amazing technologies and innovations to the market and will empower healthcare organizations, physicians, interdisciplinary care teams and patients to leverage the cloud anywhere for better information access, capture and sharing.
Janet Dillione is executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Healthcare, a leading healthcare IT provider of medical intelligence solutions: speech-enabled clinical documentation, computer-assisted clinical documentation, decision support and analytics solutions. NuanceHealthcare
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