What’s more, the cloud and web-based applications are becoming more prominent in healthcare organizations because employees are demanding it, says Missy Krasner, managing director for healthcare and life sciences at Box, a cloud-based, file sharing company.
“Employees expect the same ease of use at work that they do at home,” Ms. Krasner says. “A lot of [healthcare organizations] are embracing the cloud now because they realize that many of their employees are used to using cloud-based, consumer-grade apps at home, like Facebook, Twitter, or OpenTable, and many have these apps on their phone.”
Not only are employees seeking this familiarity and ease with the cloud-based apps, but cloud computing also provides an added layer of security and protection for sensitive data storage, especially if employees are working remotely. Ms. Krasner says often times, employees simply email themselves documents as attachments if they needed quick access from home and don’t want to VPN into the organization’s system. But these types of employee ‘rogue workarounds’ don’t always follow security policies and they create enterprise vulnerabilities for data loss and potential HIPAA breaches.
“We call this ‘shadow IT’ where employees engage in workarounds or break rules set up by their IT departments because they want an easier way to get access to their daily work files or information,” Ms. Krasner says.
Enter a cloud-based collaboration platform, which offers users access to documents and files from anywhere or on any device but also keeps that information secure.
“Once you’re starting to move documents to the cloud, you’re able to collaborate easier with others and audit who has access to which documents and at what level of permissions,” Ms. Krasner says. “It also eliminates the need for shadow IT, as all of your content is stored in one place, and it’s easy to search for and edit. You no longer have to put your organization at risk by using inadequate file sharing solutions, like USB drives or corporate email, that may inadvertently leak content outside of your enterprise.” Ms. Krasner says.
In addition to the security of sensitive data and information, cloud storage also offers operational and computational benefits, Ms. Krasner suggests.
First, Ms. Krasner says storing data in the cloud offers “massive” computational scale because organizations can store exponentially more data in the cloud than they are when storing locally. Additionally, storing data in the cloud is cheaper because organizations don’t have to manage on-site servers and expensive hardware.
Secondly, by hosting data in the cloud, organizations can “unlock” their data from the enterprise-based systems that store them and use the raw data to find clinical insights. “Once you unlock that data, you can start performing queries on it,” Ms. Krasner says. “You can develop your own set of algorithms or work with outside vendors on their analytic tools. When data is housed locally and not in the cloud, it can get trapped in various enterprise-based systems that silo the data. It then is very hard to federate all that data to perform insightful analytics.”
Finally, Ms. Krasner says the cloud offers organizations a way to innovate and grow. “It’s the concept of what we call platform versus product,” she says. “When you start leveraging the cloud, you really can start taking advantage of a platform-based model where you can invite third parties in to build on top of your platform. You can de-identify your data and other parties can come in using your APIs and do some interesting things with it.”
For example, she says the government is already doing such work with its Data.gov initiative. By releasing Medicare data, others can perform analyses on it and use the information for different purposes, such as apps on referral patterns, triage or cost and transparency.
Ms. Krasner says cloud-computing and cloud-based collaboration tools offer organizations a secure way to store, share and view data, especially for an industry that requires a lot of data sharing and collaboration between providers, payers and patients.
“As you start thinking about scalable solutions that can reduce your IT footprint, the cloud becomes an ideal answer,” she says.
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