Figure 1. According to International Data Corp, cloud offerings will gain significantly on traditional IT products by 2014.
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In the past few years, the business world has embraced a new buzzword— cloud computing. Cloud computing announcements appear with regularity from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other vendors. Most individuals are using the cloud in some capacity—e-mail, social networking, photo sharing sites, online banking, and thousands of other everyday uses, even if they don’t realize it. So what exactly is cloud computing, and how can it benefit the healthcare industry today?

Gartner, Inc defines cloud computing as “a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.” In a nutshell, cloud computing is Internet-based computing. Instead of storing software and data on a local PC hard drive or on data servers as businesses have for many years, cloud computing uses the power of the Internet to store data online.

Worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is forecast to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, according to International Data Corp. This rapid growth rate is over five times the projected rate of growth for traditional IT products (Figure 1).

Other than early adopters, many healthcare providers are hesitant to try cloud computing and still have questions about security and privacy issues. However, many cloud computing technologies are proven and available now to cut costs and provide better healthcare services. For instance, AT&T recently announced its ForHealth Practice, “specialized services that will harness innovative technology to help improve patient care and reduce medical costs nationwide.”

Figure 2. In the past it could take years to connect medical devices to the network and to capture data.
Figure 3. Today, ready-made solutions like Eurotech’s Everyware Device Cloud greatly reduce deployment time for healthcare IT departments.
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Zachary Bujnoch, a research analyst with Frost & Sullivan’s North America Healthcare Practice, explains that embracing cloud computing is a form of IT outsourcing for the healthcare industry. He explains that healthcare differs from a lot of other verticals because it is very hard to outsource and the systems are incredibly diverse. He points out that the cloud allows healthcare providers to outsource parts of their IT services, and this option has opened up a lot of doors.

By moving some IT functions out of the local data center at healthcare institutions, providers can focus on their core competency—providing medical care. The most exciting things happening in cloud computing do more than just outsource IT functions, they improve patient care.

FDA certification is another barrier to bringing full-scale cloud services to the medical industry. Currently, medical devices must be certified but the method of storing data is not specifically regulated. Cloud services can be reliable and secure (see the sidebar, “Reliability and security in the cloud”), but healthcare IT departments must add another layer of planning when deploying medical devices to ensure a cloud solution will meet all HIPAA and other requirements.

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