Nov 17
2015
How Healthcare is Using Cloud
Guest post by Ali Din, CMO, dinCloud
Can you remember how you operated without a cell phone at your disposal 24/7? If you’re like most people today, braving the outside world without a cell in hand probably gives you palpitations. The healthcare industry has seen a comparable shift as a result of technology innovation over the past couple decades. So much so that healthcare practitioners who are somewhat new to the industry may not be accustomed to the manual practices that were in use just a few years ago.
As for today, we know that healthcare companies are using cloud. Perhaps most prominently, electronic health records (EHR) are widely adopted. In fact, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) reports that a majority (83 percent) of healthcare organizations are using cloud services today. With adoption spanning nearly the entire industry, cloud technology has transformed how healthcare is administered.
Given the scale of cloud adoption, a few questions remain. Namely, how is healthcare using cloud today? Now that the industry has adopted the cloud, what does the future hold?
How Is Healthcare Using Cloud?
To start, let’s explore one specific use case. Medicalodges, a post-acute healthcare organization based in Kansas, was looking to get away from managing its own infrastructure. By moving to the cloud, it was able to improve collaboration, security, and set up a business continuity/disaster recovery (BC/DR) solution. Today, the organization has virtualized its servers with dinCloud’s Hosted Virtual Server (dinServer) solution. As a result, Medicalodges reports benefits including: improved collaboration, security, disaster recovery, cost savings, and scalability. Looking ahead, Medicalodges has future plans to run a mix of browser-based thin clients and continue to expand its cloud infrastructure.
Moving to larger scale trends: Tech Target sums up current use of cloud in healthcare with the following applications: storage of protected health information, software as a service (SaaS), platforms as a service (PaaS), digital imaging, and clinical research.
In its 2014 Analytics Cloud Survey, HIMSS found that 43.6 percent of surveyed healthcare organizations are currently hosting clinical applications and data. Meanwhile, 35.1 percent are using the cloud for BC/DR, 14.9 percent have virtualized servers, and 8.1 percent are using hosted virtual desktops (HVDs). In another case, a medical organization needed to run several versions of a specific testing application. However, they could not run it on the same computer because of compatibility conflicts of running the same application in multiple instances. They leveraged application publishing from dinCloud to virtualize the application. The application sits in the cloud and can be opened in multiple instances on the same computer now.