No Rainy Days Ahead for Cloud Computing

Grazed from HealthTech Zone. Author: Deborah Hirsch.

For a long time, healthcare organizations shied away from cloud computing, rightfully worried about privacy issues and security when confidential data was stored and managed on the Web.

But all that seems to have dissolved. A recent report by Dallas-based research firm MarketsandMarkets predicts the market will grow to $5.4 billion worldwide by 2017, according to a story by James Ritchie. In 2011, market penetration for cloud computing in healthcare was apparently 4 percent, representing only a $1.7-billion market.

Cloud computing allows organizations to rely on remote machines owned by another firm for software and data storage via a Web-based service for such functions as electronic medical records and for back-office functions, including billing and payroll, according to the study…

Erin McCann wrote that the compound annual growth rate of the cloud computing market will grow 20.5 percent from 2010 to 2017, according to the report.

Walmart recently went live with cloud-based technology in its health clinics in June, according to McCann, enabling “remote video consultations between a patient and doctor through a virtual face-to-face video interface, over a secure video network,” and allowing users to conduct telepresence-quality face-to-face interactions over the Internet using existing laptops, smartphones or tablets.

Cloud computing provides many benefits to doctor’s clinics, hospitals and health clinics, which all require quick access to computing and large storage facilities which are not provided in older IT infrastructures.

A big need now for current healthcare organizations is the ability to share data across many platforms and users. Healthcare organizations have long been worried about the security of data “in the cloud,” and some believe it’s what’s behind the recent surge in data breaches, which have gone up 32 percent since 2010 and caused $6.5 billion in healthcare costs.

Yet others beg to differ. Typical data systems in the past relied on client servers, which centered on local servers, usually “housed in poorly-secured server rooms, directly accessed by desktop computers and laptops scattered throughout the enterprise,” according to Craig Collins, president and CEO at Perminova.

A secure, private cloud system is built around a high-security private database, Collins noted, networked to users through Web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS), where each client’s data is protected in its own database framework.

Here’s the biggest reason why data is safer in the cloud than on client servers, according to Collins: In a Web-based secure private cloud, “patient information need never reside on PCs, laptops or other user hardware, so it remains safe in case of equipment loss or theft.”