Cloud Computing

At a time when healthcare reform is making sweeping changes in the way providers and patients are viewing healthcare, some physicians have become open to business models that promise to make healthcare more efficient while improving care. One example of this is applying the franchise concept to orthopedic care, in a network of clinics that will be able to share and use information in ways that will drive down costs.

As hospitals face challenges of moving to the electronic medical record, often while operating under tight budgetary constraints and with small IT staffs, moving data to a cloud platform is becoming an attractive option to some. Making the right decision depends on carefully weighing risks and benefits, according to weighing risk Michael Gaasche, manager with the business development department of Smart Devine & Company, LLC, a Philadelphia-based consultancy and, prior to that, IT director with the Department of Health and Opportunity for the city of Philadelphia.

Cloud computing is becoming a valuable tool for hospitals, and there are good reasons for that, as more organizations digitize their clinical systems. I recently had a conversation with Richard Temple, executive consultant at Beacon Partners, Inc., Weymouth, Mass. Typically, a lot of the computerization by hospitals has centered on financial systems, and hospitals typically wanted to keep that information close, housing it in their own data centers, he says. But things were more manageable, in terms of what needed to be available. After all, if a billing system went down at night, lives didn’t hang in the balance. But with the advent of the computerization of clinical systems, hospitals are faced with requirements of uptime and redundancy. “Hospitals aren’t necessarily geared up to support a computing infrastructure of that magnitude, so they look to the cloud,” Temple says.

There has been a lot of publicity lately about the benefits of cloud computing in healthcare, although hospital systems have been taking a cautious approach when it comes to moving certain applications to a cloud platform.

Another Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual conference has come and gone. So what did Santa bring the Radiology community this year? In one word, my answer is the “communalization” of imaging!