A friend of mine started a business providing a uniquely customizable, cloud-based EMR solution. His business is growing quickly and enables small physician practices to create a “practicized” EMR that minimizes retraining, lowers overall time to deploy, and is ridiculously inexpensive compared to traditional EMR solutions. His solution offers these benefits because it is cloud based.
Healthcare IT News forecasts cloud computing in healthcare will have a compound annual growth rate of 20.5 percent from 2010 to 2017. The estimated market is predicted to hit $5.4 billion in five years.
I think this is a positive trend. Most hospitals and payors centralize their data storage in some way so the idea of shipping PHI across town or across the country is not new. What is new is the concept that some other organization is responsible for the functions IT is doing today. This includes system performance tuning, disaster recovery, high availability, and other back-office tasks that are hygiene factors for better healthcare.
On the positive side, collecting usable data from many organizations has the potential to drastically improve outcomes. Expanding the scope from one or two local facilities to a nationwide network combined with some creative analytics tools can offer insights and examples that are not available at the local level.
For example, epidemiological trends and outbreaks are far easier to catch when multiple sources of data are viewed as a collection. With a cloud-based, multi-tenant system, the addition of a few rules to monitor this kind of data and create alerts when the trends change is trivial compared to the infrastructure needed to collect data from many sources. Other examples include population health, chronic disease management, accountable care, and quality.
For cloud computing, the forecast is bright.
