Jul 8
2015
Healthcare Security: Remotely Securing Healthcare Data
Guest post by Amit Cohen, co-founder and CEO, FortyCloud.
Remote access is changing the practice of medicine – from data collected remotely from newly developed telemedicine devices, to surgery conducted by a surgeon in an offsite location. A smartphone application, currently in development, is set to monitor a user’s voice to detect mood changes for individuals with bipolar disorder. Devices and applications such as these not only improve the quality of care available to patients across the globe, their use also results in exponential growth in the sources and volumes of data. These cutting-edge technologies present new challenges for IT professionals who are responsible for ensuring high availability (always-accessible data), scalability and flexibility for their healthcare organizations.
To enable scalable, high performance from at lower costs, even from remote locations, healthcare and pharmaceutical IT have adopted the cloud. Since cloud data centers can be diversified across the globe, cloud computing provides quick access to globally diverse users.
The cloud also offers the scalability to handle the massive influx of new data generated by new health care applications expected from the implementation of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Stage 3 Proposed Rule, is also likely to result in additional volumes of digital data. This Rule seeks to align the EHR Incentive Programs with other CMS quality reporting programs that use certified EHR technology to promote improved patient outcomes and health.
Therefore, it is not surprising that healthcare cloud computing is forecasted to grow to $9.48 billion by 2020, according a recent study; an impressive increase from the current, 2015 market value of $3.73 billion.