Cloud Computing

As the vast UPMC health system in Pittsburgh moves forward on its big-data journey, senior vice president and CIO Dan Drawbaugh shares his perspectives on that journey exclusively with HCI’s Mark Hagland. Among the top learnings so far: the level of collaboration between and among senior clinician, administrative, and IT leaders required to achieve big-data breakthroughs will be exceptional.

With the rise in popularity of tablet computers in the workplace, it’s interesting to see what’s behind its uptake, as well as the challenges the BYOD trend brings to healthcare CIOs.

With the rapid adoption of audiovisual technology into healthcare, healthcare CIOs and other healthcare IT leaders face the difficult decision of how to balance their organizations’ investment dollars against budgetary constraints, security, and selection of technology that is appropriate to the provider organization’s IT infrastructure. At a roundtable discussion, “Balancing Innovation, Budget Constraints, and Network Security,” part of the Technology Crossroads Conference that was put on by the National eHealth Collaborative in Washington, D.C., last week, expert panelists discussed wide-raging topics confronting provider organizations against the backdrop of the fast-changing technology landscape, including technology investments, cost pressures, health information exchange, network security, cloud computing, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

As health information technology and health information exchanges (HIEs) make progress on improving the quality of healthcare, one area that has received limited research is how HIEs can provide timely access to clinical information in response to a disaster. That's the subject of the final report, released in July, of the Southeast Regional HIT-HIE Collaboration (SERCH), which makes recommendations to improve how the nation's ability to respond to natural disasters through the use of HIEs.

Michael Green, D.O., has been helping to lead his radiologist colleagues forward towards automation-facilitated efficiency enhancement. Ultimately, he and his fellow radiologists in the Liberty Division of the Alliance Radiology group in the Kansas City metro area found a cloud-based PACS solution to be the inevitable choice when it came to access-anywhere imaging informatics.