Healthcare Dive, October 22, 2015, by Heather Caspi
Healthcare data are entering a new era with the mass adoption of EHRs, the harnessing of big data, the rise of genomics, personalized medicine, and more. To manage all that data, hospitals and other healthcare entities will increasingly be looking to new solutions involving the cloud, numerous tech experts tell Healthcare Dive, and are increasingly ready to move past the regulatory and security concerns that have previously held healthcare back.
The research appears to back those ideas up; a report by MarketsandMarkets predicts the healthcare cloud computing market will grow from $3.73 billion in 2015 to $9.48 billion by 2020.
It’s not only the need for data storage driving the move, but pushes to advance interoperability, payment reform, mobile data access, and security, says Missy Krasner, Managing Director for Healthcare & Life Sciences of Box, a cloud storage and collaboration company working with institutions including the Henry Ford Health System, Beaumont Health System, and Johns Hopkins Healthcare Solutions. Krasner previously served as a founding member of Google Health and was a senior advisor to the first National Coordinator for Health IT at the ONC.
“Now because healthcare is so in need of better interoperability and better connections, they need to figure out a better way to communicate outside of their firewalls with all the people they do business with every single day, and that’s really hard to do if your data are locked on-prem in servers,” Krasner says.
Hospitals and payers have historically been slower to the cloud than other industries, but “in the last five years there’s been a massive move,” she says, noting that according to MarketsandMarkets, there has been growth from about 4% of the healthcare industry doing some kind of cloud computing to a prediction of 20% by 2017. “There’s been a very large year-over-year adoption,” she says.
Why now?
“It’s a data explosion,” Krasner says, arguing there’s no way healthcare entities can continue, from an infrastructure standpoint, to house all their data onsite with their own servers because of the expense and the lockdown on the data. “If it’s all in separate enterprise silos such as EHRs, billing and registration systems, it’s difficult to do an analysis,” she says. “Doing it in the cloud allows for one platform and one security model, and immediate access to start doing things with the data.”
Read more at http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/healthcare-looks-to-future-in-cloud-computing/407746/