6 Cloud Considerations for Health Orgs

The cloud offers considerable benefits to healthcare, which is undergoing dramatic and essential transformation without the necessary financial or technological means to support the level and speed-of-change required. As such, the model’s flexibility, scalability and security are enticing attributes for healthcare – but the ability to create collaborative networks in the cloud may be the most valuable to hospitals and other healthcare organizations in the long run.

Here are some of the challenges facing healthcare for which the cloud has advantages:

Large and small healthcare providers need to be collectively accountable for the care of specific populations, and in turn, to deliver better care at lower costs. At a minimum, to coordinate care for their mutual patients, these organizations need to be able to collect, store and share data with one another, not to mention with other providers if those patients seek care beyond their "medical home." The cloud can provide a virtual location for this kind of collaboration to occur...