Many healthcare providers have questions and doubts about adopting cloud computing for administration and hosting of their healthcare information. Steve Aylward, Microsoft's general manager for U.S. health and life sciences, has encouraged healthcare IT decision makers to embrace the technology, which he said could help them improve patient care and provide new delivery models that can increase efficiency and reduce costs.
"Just about everyone I know in healthcare is asking the same question: "What can cloud computing do for me?" Aylward writes in a June 28 blog post.
"Plenty," Aylward answers. "The cloud can allow providers to focus less on managing IT and more on delivering better care: It can, for instance, be used to migrate e-mail, collaboration, and other traditional applications into the web. It can also be used to share information seamlessly and in near-real-time across devices and other organizations," Aylward explains.
Generally defined as anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet, a cloud computing model that offers a software-as-a-service platform is increasingly being offered to healthcare delivery organizations, especially small and medium-size physician practices that are budget constrained and have few technical administrators on staff.
What has helped information technology managers at health delivery organizations take a closer look at cloud computing, however, is the Obama administration's objective to move medical practices and hospitals away from paper-based systems and onto digitized records. Primarily through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the government has established programs under Medicare and Medicaid to provide incentive payments for the "meaningful use" of certified electronic medical record (EMR) technology.
The government's drive to have every American provided with an EMR by 2014 will mean that digitized clinical data is expected to grow exponentially. However, several doctors contacted by InformationWeek say that, even with those considerations, they are in no rush to outsource the maintenance of their important records and they have delayed their decisions to put sensitive information, such as their EMR systems, onto a cloud-based computing model.
Dr. Michael Lee, a pediatrician and director of clinical informatics for Atrius Health, an alliance of five nonprofit multi-specialty medical groups with practice sites throughout eastern Massachusetts, said that while he recognizes that cloud computing can be a cheaper and more practical model, especially for non-mission-critical applications, he is waiting to see what improvements in security will take place over the next five to 10 years before supporting a decision to put high-level data on cloud computing technology.
"The only cloud computing that we would contemplate at the moment is in the personal health record space, so that patients would own the dimension in the cloud in terms of where they want to store or access information," Lee said.
