Cloud Services in Healthcare

What are the commercially available SaaS-based Cloud solutions for the Healthcare industry?
Cloud services are increasingly becoming popular in the Healthcare industry. And yes, they are starting to become a lot more common. One example is a New Zealand company called HSA Global, which has a solution called Collaborative Care Management System (CCMS). This is entirely based on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform and focuses on shared care management, is fully integrated electronic health record and clinical case management solution that enables healthcare organizations to improve client care while creating clinical and business efficiencies. It enables people from different organizations to share and manage patients' health records, which ultimately bring convenience to the patients as well.

Dell has rolled out the Dell's Healthcare Cloud Services at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Feb 2011 conference in Orlando, that is a subscription-based private cloud services for healthcare providers. These cloud services will provide a more streamlined access to patients’ archived information for easier sharing and management of the information between physicians, hospitals and other point of care. These new cloud services stem from Dell’s newest acquisitions of medical archiving InSite One, that provided healthcare providers medical data image archives through Dell’s Unified Clinical Archiving (UCA) private cloud services. Partnerships with Microsoft Amalga health intelligence platform to provide medical records analytics capabilities that will help healthcare providers manage and consolidate patients’ records. Dell also added security features to the analytics cloud offering with the acquisition of Secureworks, to provide compliance with Federal and State Health Care data reporting requirements.

Microsoft is also continuing to aggressively invest in interoperability and connectivity functionality, free of charge, making it continually easier for patients to upload and track their health data. Some of this functionality comes from interfacing with common health devices such as blood pressure monitors, pedometers, glucometers and even digital Images. Microsoft also offers HealthVault services through Windows Azure platform. HealthVault supports native DICOM (digital imaging) as part of the HealthVault connectivity feature. Their partners range from CVS, Aetna, Quest, and few others, which allow patients the ability to retrieve some of their data across the internet in order to develop a comprehensive patient record without a lot of manual work.

iSOFT's Lorenzo solutions enable collaboration and interoperability across all sectors of care and remove traditional barriers to sharing health related information and electronic record management. Lorenzo creates virtual health networks that securely connect doctors, care facilities and patients while protecting the organizations’ previous investments by integrating seamlessly with the existing systems. 


There are many other Cloud Service providers in the market and the competition is heating up!


So what are the topmost barriers for the adoption of cloud services in the healthcare sector?

• Control: Moving to the cloud allows a healthcare organization to focus on new projects or enhancements, as the organization no longer has to deploy and manage parts of their infrastructure. But it takes time for Cloud Service providers to earn that trust and for organizations to hand over the control over the management and deployment of IT. 
• Security & Privacy: Organizations, specially in the Healthcare industry, take time to be able to feel comfortable with cloud service providers and let them protect and secure the organization's confidential information. In reality, the amount of effort and engineering that goes into ensuring cloud services provides the best privacy and security is second to none, and most organizations would struggle if they try to match the engineering that is required to run a service like this internally.
• Data Sovereignty: This is an issue that is heard a lot from customers who are uncomfortable about their data being hosted in data centers overseas. While some countries have strong privacy laws that require information of its citizens to be kept on shore, some other countries do not.
• Lack of Standards: With respect to digital imaging, DICOM has been the predominant format for almost every system out there. This made it very simple for organizations to simply just start pushing or pulling images over the wire. When it comes to health records, however, there are some challenges. Since not all public & private healthcare providers can agree on one single standard, it remains a challenge for many to decide whether it is going to be CCD or CCR standards. Google Health, for example supports a subset of the CCR, while Microsoft HealthVault supports the entire standards set.

References: Microsoft, Dell, iSoft, HSAGlobal's web sites. 
Also published on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more