Johns Hopkins and VMware Forge Medical Records Mega-Cloud

Medical and IT researchers at Johns Hopkins University, healthcare application software supplier Harris Corp, and virtualization juggernaut VMware have teamed up to create a medical imaging cloud that they hope will become the central, secure repository for US citizens and the doctors who care for them.

The desire to provide doctors in America with electronic access to medical records is as old as computing itself and sits right alongside the holy grails of the paperless office and fifth-generation programming languages. But Jim Philbin, who is co-director for the Center for Biomedical and Imaging Informatics at Johns Hopkins, tells El Reg that the combination of broadband networks, virtual desktop infrastructure, and cloudy infrastructure is making a medical imaging cloud a technical and economic possibility...