Cloud Computing: Will state health departments embrace IT Big Five?

Grazed from GovHealthIT. Author: Tom Sullivan.

A majority of government organizations are planning to institute technology uber-trends within the next three years. The only thing is: A hefty percentage of them lack the infrastructure to actually do so. That’s according to a survey conducted by MeriTalk and, while the self-described government IT network polled state and local officials spanning the array of departments, its findings are particularly applicable to healthcare. MeriTalk lists the Big Five of IT as big data, cloud computing, data center consolidation, mobility, and security.

"Public health departments have perhaps the most to gain from Big Five initiatives,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk. “Mobile health drives community engagement, big data delivers better understanding of population health drivers, security keeps private information private.” That said, will state and local health departments follow through on intentions to adopt those technologies?…

MeriTalk’s findings suggest that network capacity could be problematic. Indeed, 63 percent of the state and local IT professionals MeriTalk surveyed for the report, Big Five in overdrive: Are state and local networks ready?, indicated that they would encounter network bottlenecks if trying to build the Big Five on existing infrastructure, and 89 percent responded that maintaining the same service levels would require additional capacity…

Read more from the source @ http://www.govhealthit.com/news/will-state-health-depts-embrace-it-big-data-meritalk-cloud-mhealth

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