Business associate agreements remain ambiguous amidst cloud-computing advances

Grazed from PhysBizTech. Author: Madelyn Kearns.

While clouds often symbolize a lazy sense of freedom or wistful disconnect, healthcare’s adoption of cumuli demands certain boundaries be established to keep the latest advances in information storage/sharing from raining down on the industry’s developing techno-ecosystem.

As Adam Greene — partner at the Law Offices of Davis Wright Tremaine and chairman for the HIMSS Cloud Security Workgroup — noted during his introduction at the Privacy & Security Forum in Boston last week, a purportedly successful outlet like cloud computing, rather liberated and undefined in these early stages, poses a lot of questions for providers and servicers alike regarding its receptiveness to hard HIPAA legalities…

“I don’t think we need to spend 20 minutes talking about the wonders of cloud computing services and the potential benefits there,” Greene began. “I thought this quote [from “The Economics of Cloud Computing” Booz Allen Hamilton Dec. 2010] did a pretty good job of encapsulating that: ‘Our analysis implies that over a thirteen year life cycle, the cost of implementing and sustaining a cloud environment may be as much as two-thirds lower than maintaining a traditional, non-virtualized IT data center.’”…

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