“The cloud is crucial to many initiatives in healthcare, including value-based care, big data and patient engagement. CIOs recognize the importance of cloud computing and embrace it.
‘People are actually embracing [the cloud] in healthcare,’ said Ed McCallister, senior vice president and CIO at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). ‘Now is the time [for cloud computing]. … I’ve been in healthcare pretty much my entire career, and this is absolutely the most transformative time.’
In the past, health IT professionals worried about the security of the cloud, but over the years, the stability of major cloud platforms has eased those concerns. Instead, healthcare organizations see the value of cloud computing choices, such as how cost-effective the cloud is and its role in value-based care, population health and patient engagement.
Of the three well-known cloud computing options — public, private and hybrid … — hybrid cloud has gained favor among some hospital CIOs.
‘A lot of us … use a hybrid approach,’ said Karen Clark, CIO at OrthoTennessee in Knoxville, Tenn. Along with Clark and McCallister, Indranil Ganguly, vice president and CIO at JFK Health System, and Deanna Wise, CIO and executive vice president at Dignity Health, are using a hybrid approach with the cloud …
UPMC is among those facilities that favor a hybrid approach. It takes applications already used within the organization that have a competitive advantage — such as storage — and moves them into the cloud, leaving everything else on-premises. ‘That’s probably the most prominent approach that people would take,’ McCallister said.
Ganguly and JFK Health take a similar approach. Many of the applications used by JFK Health, based in Edison, N.J., also reside on a hybrid cloud setup, Ganguly said. The facility uses ‘a vendor partner [cloud platform], and multiple customers [are] hosted on it, but it’s not our infrastructure,’ he explained. ‘We don’t even set it up or own it. It’s not a private cloud, but it is a restricted cloud, and so that’s what we use right now for a lot of our applications. It’s a software-as-a-service type [of] model, and the software is housed at the vendor side, and we’re accessing it remotely.’
McCallister said the hybrid cloud model is popular in healthcare right now because the cloud still represents a bit of the unknown. The hybrid cloud acts as a testbed for certain things in healthcare, he noted, adding, ‘Some of it is kind of toe in the water — not knowing the cloud as well as they know the traditional environment.’
Additionally, the hybrid cloud can take the pressure off IT staff, Ganguly said: ‘I don’t have to have people focused on [hybrid], and it allows our team to focus more on the application itself and making sure the application is set up well for our users.’”
The preceding quote from the article entitled “CIOs embrace the value of cloud computing in healthcare” by Kristen Lee, accessed on August 29, 2017 in TechTarget’s SearchHealthIT (http://bit.ly/2wPi3ls), highlights the the increasing adoption of cloud computing by healthcare provider CIOs and benefits thereof. An IT solution compliant with the Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service reference architecture (CHARTSaaS RA) would facilitate this adoption by enabling healthcare provider subject matter experts (SMEs) to automate processes with minimal cost and complexity, and little or no dependence on the provider’s IT staff or system resources.
CHARTSaaS-built apps would operate as systems of engagement with professional providers and their patients to leverage the on-premise legacy systems of record referred to as electronic health record (EHR) or hospital information systems (HIS) using secure intelligent interoperability. Furthermore, they would facilitate automation such problematic and error-prone use cases as differential diagnosis and treatment planning, and alarm/alert fatigue mitigation. Since such apps would be easily modifiable, they would facilitate both compliance with the accreditation standards of The Joint Commission that govern continuous process improvement and accrual of medical knowledge in a digitally based operational mode. And all these capabilities are facilitated by the fact that CHARTSaaS as a cloud-based solution as a service, designed for use in a hybrid cloud environment.
Please validate these CHARTSaaS RA-related propositions to your own satisfaction by reading the white paper at http://bit.ly/2vmK1Rx, viewing the tutorials posted on YouTube (http://bit.ly/2sVajvS and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5OtbCCDNLs) and also by reviewing the details of CHARTSaaS™ and the CHARTSaaS RA™ in these presentations:
https://mix.office.com/embed/19g5mpp3f6qkx
https://mix.office.com/embed/1bp3nuiwdjk86
https://mix.office.com/watch/o2y82frum3lt
Healthcare providers will benefit significantly from appreciating and then applying a CHARTSaaS RA-compliant IT solution. To do so will mitigate medical mistakes (currently the third leading cause of patient deaths. per Makaray and Daniel (http://bit.ly/1rtW6Sa); thereby minimizing patient adverse events and optimizing clinical case outcomes while maximizing the cost-effectiveness of care and treatment, and also accelerating the accrual and facilitating the application of medical knowledge.