Healthcare providers are under enormous pressure with healthcare reform. Markets and economics are forcing providers to examine IT spending and to consider new emerging technologies to reform operations. The Recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) calls for healthcare reform, including deployment and utilization of an EHR by 2014. The virtualization of systems and cloud computing are compelling models for improving workflows as well as patient care. In this article, we will discuss the basics of cloud computing, including key benefits and features.
Cloud computing, along with virtualization, has emerged as the next-generation computing technology. Stemming from various technologies and standards, including cluster computing, grid computing, utility computing, Web Services, and others, cloud computing focuses on providing a single, easy-to-use, virtualized view on a set of resources (data, computing power, network, and applications). “Cloud” can easily be defined as a set of network-connected computers. “Cloud”, however, can also be defined as a set of platforms, infrastructure, and software applications working in tandem to provide various electronic services to users over the Internet. In the cloud computing world, everything (from low layer hardware such as CPU, memory, disk, network etc to high layer software applications) is a “service” which is accessible over the Internet. These cloud services can be grouped into three categories: 1) software as a service (SaaS) – software applications provided as a service on demand, 2) platform as a service (PaaS) – service platforms provided as a basis on which software applications are deployed, and 3) infrastructure as a service (IaaS) – storage and computing capabilities provided as a standardized service infrastructure mainly supporting SaaS and PaaS. Cloud computing technology has many features and benefits, such as elasticity, scalability, cost-efficiency (“pay as you use” model), high-throughput, and availability. More and more software applications, along with business logic and data, move from local computers or servers into the clouds at a different level – public cloud, private cloud or hybrid.
For healthcare providers of all sizes, cloud computing looks very promising mainly because it can bring a significant amount of cost reduction in running electronic medical record applications, managing real-time high-throughput clinical workloads, maintaining IT infrastructure, and introducing new clinical solutions and updates.
Decisions need to be made between two extremes: building local computing infrastructure (having data locally) and keeping everything ‘in a cloud’. A large hospital might want to adopt cloud computing to build a private cloud. Smaller hospitals might want to invest in cloud-based infrastructure to take the burden of system administration off of internal staff / internal IT. A solo or small size practice (clinic) may want to keep all clinical applications in a cloud, including clinical data, and, by doing this, may even be able to improve EHR / data security. In this model, security is actually increased by the elimination of the risk of from server snatching or stolen laptops – because no sensitive data is stored locally (all patient information is stored in the secured cloud).

Each healthcare provider needs to understand the full scope of cloud computing for each practice, however, by examining the infrastructure features and security / access benefits of cloud computing, one can truly say the forecast for cloud computing in healthcare is sunny!