Compliant Computing

Accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical home models will need to easily share information as well as offer more elastic pricing models than traditional licensed based offerings. That means that as demand increases, hospitals and other healthcare providers don’t need to ramp their infrastructures up and down.

The cloud also gives large provider networks the ability to strengthen relationships with their referring physicians and in turn, their patients. In today’s landscape, hospitals and health systems are continuously striving to offer new services and benefits to referring physicians so that they don’t lose patient referrals to competing providers. With cloud services, such as private-label email, hospitals and healthcare systems can provide domain names with secure email to physicians at a very low cost, while creating a vehicle for loyalty. Both Advocate Health in Chicago and Methodist University Hospital in Memphis have leveraged Microsoft Exchange Online email services to this end, and more are rolling out similar programs across the country.

The healthcare industry and technology providers are working to ensure that cloud computing offerings are secure and meet the regulations of the HITECH Act in the way data is stored and funneled in the cloud. As those assurances emerge, we expect that over the next three to five years, we’ll see more providers embracing the benefits of cloud computing. We’ll see an increase in the use of online services for business applications, such as email, CRM and file-sharing. And we expect to see an increased adoption and mixture of private and public cloud deployment, with some larger organizations even experimenting with the cloud to create and sell custom applications. The possibilities of the cloud are endless for health organizations.

Source: Microsoft Corporation