ICTpost Health IT Bureau
The use of cloud-based electronic health records is spreading, especially among small physician practices. But the strength of this trend varies by region, and many doctors’ distrust of cloud services still impedes their use of this technology
There’s been a growth in applications for non-ionizing or non-radiating technologies. It seems like the areas where we’re growing the most involve MRI and ultrasound rather than CT. Although people have been focused on continued lowering of the dose in CT, still the growth in applications for the non-ionizing technologies has been pretty impressive.
There’s going to be a bigger need in the future for computing power and networking because the hospitals are dealing with more and more images and more and more technologies, and computing power and figuring out a way to deal with delivering all the images are going to put us at a critical juncture to do that.
We’re now beginning to see changes in creating a universal health record. We’re always talking about the electronic health record but a universal health record would provide for anyone caring for a patient immediate access to their clinical information, clinical images and anywhere/anytime delivery so that we don’t have to deal with some of the cumbersome tasks that we now deal with, like patients carrying around CDs or being transferred around the hospital and not having the images. We can think of a cloud storage concept and bringing it under a universal health care record.
Most EMR (electronic medical record) applications treat PACS as a loosely coupled system and have mechanisms to support integration with various solutions. Consuming PACS via the SaaS model will be much more straightforward and less disruptive to clinical end users than would be the case if PACS was tightly integrated with the EMR.
The healthcare industry is anything but static. Demands resulting from trends such as BYOD (Bring your own device) are definitely keeping Health-IT departments busy. Evaluating applications against organization-defined criteria for SaaS suitability, and outsourcing where it makes sense to do so can enable IT to focus more time on strategic investment areas rather than “keeping the lights on”.
Need for Improved Access & Mobility: There is an increasing desire to access images anywhere, anytime, on any device in order to support a wide range of clinical workflows (e.g. diagnostic imaging on a workstation, reviewing an image with a patient on a mobile device at the point of care, etc.). SaaS applications are typically very mobile and support a wide range of client devices.
Several technology innovations have enabled medical imaging solutions to be delivered efficiently from the cloud. Virtualized, highly-scalable, servers and storage platforms enable large pools of computing resources that can be shared across applications. This reduces the solution cost (economies of scale) and improves agility (applications can respond automatically to fluctuations in demand). Converged networking solutions can manage network and storage traffic over the same unified fabric, reducing cables, complexity and cost. Improvements in server-side graphics capabilities enable images to be rendered in the cloud and streamed to client devices over low-bandwidth network connections.
Big trends for the EHR cloud
The use of cloud-based electronic health records is spreading, especially among small physician practices, observers say. But the strength of this trend varies by region, and many doctors’ distrust of cloud services still impedes their use of this technology.
Physician practices. More physician practices are turning to cloud-based EHRs. The EHRs may be from companies like Allscripts, athenahealth, NextGen or eClinicalWorks, but a company like Dell, NetApp, IBM, Verizon and others are likely providing “the cloud. The challenges are obviously convincing people that their PHI will be secure, that there won’t be a data breach. That’s easily solved. The bigger impediment is just organizations that feel that running IT is a core competency. They would rather keep it in-house. They feel they can do a better job by keeping it in-house than letting it go out.
Community hospitals. Community hospitals, too, increasingly are viewing the cloud as an option for their EHR and other IT. Three quarters ago, the practices started with this offering in the cloud . Hospitals are beginning to offer cloud services themselves. There will be a big uptick in private cloud where a provider will be essentially the cloud provider to their community of interest.
Medical imaging. There will be a huge shift in the cloud around medical imaging right now. Nothing that images are a critical part of the medical record. PACS imaging – all the modalities: MRI, CT, X-ray – is all being digitized and stored. But because the modalities are becoming more powerful, and the images are more fine-grained and use more storage, and there’s more images being created and, because of regulatory requirements, they have to be retained longer, storing images is becoming a huge problem because of how much storage they’re taking up. So there are now opportunities to archive to the cloud images that are not viewed frequently.
Are Web-Based EHR Systems Safe?
Most physicians who are skeptical of cloud-based EHR systems cite security as a primary concern. While uncertainty is understandable, web-based EHR systems can actually deliver greater security than client-server systems and paper records.
· Cloud-based data is safer than paper and client-server records in the event of a natural disaster or fire because the data is backed up securely in multiple locations. Backups for client-server records are most vulnerable to breach in transport to storage facilities, unlike cloud systems.
· Most people are already allowing a great deal of their sensitive data to be stored in the cloud. Email systems like Gmail and Yahoo! are stored in the cloud. Online banking, shopping and personal information on social sites like Facebook are all cloud-based systems as well.
· Ultimately, cloud-based EHR systems provide users of all sizes and industries great advantages in cost savings, data accessibility and security. Now, medical practices just have to be willing to look to the cloud for the future of healthcare IT.