Up in the air: Health IT shifts attitude on cloud
Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Ann Braley Smith.
For healthcare providers, the forecast calls for more clouds. And that’s a good thing. The healthcare and life sciences industry has been slower than others to adopt cloud technology, citing (most often) security concerns for proprietary patient data. A 2013 survey (PDF) showed that healthcare was ranked seven out of eight industries for cloud adoption, just ahead of state and local governments. The trepidation is understandable. Healthcare data is arguably the most personal of data, and the industry’s diligence, compliance and privacy regulations reflect this idea.
However, the attitude toward cloud computing is shifting. In 2011, only 4 percent of healthcare IT providers had adopted some sort of healthcare cloud solution. Since then, it’s growing at a rate of 20 percent per year. Why are health IT experts changing their minds about the way we manage and store patient information? IT experts are finding that the old concerns are largely unfounded, including these five common myths for healthcare cloud deployment, which include lack of security, high cost and insufficient functionality for end users…
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