So has the market entrance of cheap, wearable health devices that collect reams of individual health data from their wearers. With all this information so easily at hand, new and lucrative industries have been created, including the booming market for healthcare analytics. One of the largest industries the digitization of healthcare has touched off by far are cloud services. They span in type and niche, but generally are tasked to process, host or secure healthcare data and associated systems at a speed and cost that simply can’t be replicated by legacy IT infrastructure. As such, the U.S. healthcare system is moving en masse to the cloud, with the healthcare cloud market expected to be worth $9.48 billion by 2020.1
Figure 1: Charting the Digitization of Healthcare
Source: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. ‘Non-federal Acute Care Hospital Electronic Health Record Adoption,’ Health IT Quick-Stat #47. dashboard.healthit.gov/quickstats/pages/FIG-Hospital-EHR-Adoption.php. May 2016.
Cloud and consumerization
There is another emerging trend that is driving cloud adoption, one that portends major changes in the very delivery and location of healthcare—the “patient-centric” movement that puts the patient’s needs front and center. That such a movement exists may be difficult to believe by anyone who has recently experienced difficulty seeing a provider, or endured an interminable wait at a doctor’s office. But those are exactly the sort of problems the patient-centric, “consumerization” of healthcare is meant to solve, especially as patients now have more financial responsibility for their care in an era of high deductibles, premiums and co-insurance.
In a sort of quid pro quo, government and commercial insurers are judging providers based on a host of quality metrics, including many from the patient’s perspective. Most notably, these include the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, which assess how well providers communicate with and are responsive to patient needs. While these are largely focused on inpatient services, patient satisfaction and experience scores are expected to increasingly apply to outpatient services, as well. Regardless of service type, the patient experience matters. One widely cited study found that a long wait to be seen, especially for a scheduled appointment, negatively influences the patient’s perspective of the entire care experience.2
In response to patient demand for more convenient care that values their time and healthcare dollar, providers and payers are turning to virtual care, virtual appointments, queue management technology and other online options that, along with remote patient monitoring, are essentially extending healthcare beyond the four walls of the hospital. These are typically cloud-based services, whether offered directly by the provider or white-labeled from a third party vendor. They must be able to manage the data and transactions of large patient populations with flexibility and scalability—two attributes not typical of internal IT infrastructure.
Most importantly, these services call for industrial-grade security, as they process large volumes of sensitive patient information. With that, let’s turn to yet another new and lucrative industry being created…ransomware.
Healthcare under attack
It’s the kind of surreal story that presumably would only happen in a movie. Hospital clinicians discover to their mounting horror that they’ve been blocked from accessing one mission-critical file after another on the hospital network, including patient medical records—essentially bringing lifesaving care to a halt. An anonymous message appears on their computer screens: the hospital can have access back to its own systems in exchange for a hefty ransom payment.
In one of the most recent examples of “ransomware” attacks, Hollywood Presbyterian was forced to divert emergency room patients to another hospital while it attempted to gain access back to its network. Eventually, the hospital paid the ransom.3 Of course, even before the advent of ransomware, healthcare had a giant target on its back because of its access to valuable patient records that fetch lucrative sums on the black market. More specifically, this puts a target on the backs of tens of millions of patients; according to the HHS Office for Civil Rights, “as of February 1, 2016, protected health information breaches affected over 113 million individuals in 2015.”4
While the cloud isn’t a guarantee of security—securing data at the scale required today is extremely challenging to do internally. Few healthcare organizations have the resources to do it with a strong level of assurance that all bases are covered, especially in large, sprawling health systems with so many access points for hackers.
Underpinning the positive changes in healthcare
Is a migration to the cloud a must for healthcare organizations? Not officially, but only those organizations that don’t wish to tap into the valuable asset of patient data or consumer-driven desire for more convenient care can afford to turn away from cloud services. And while on its own the cloud isn’t a miracle cure for the administrative and security challenges that complicate modern healthcare, the solutions that can mitigate these challenges absolutely rely on the cloud to do their work at scale.
Darin Brannan is president & CEO of ClearDATA, a secure healthcare cloud platform and managed services company.
1 http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/cloud-computing-healthcare.asp
2 http://www.ajmc.com/journals/issue/2014/2014-vol20-n5/wait-times-patient-satisfaction-scores-and-the-perception-of-care
3 http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-me-ln-hollywood-hospital-bitcoin-20160217-story.html
4 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights. Breaches Affecting 500 or More Individuals: https://dashboard.healthit.gov/quickstats/pages/breaches-protected-health-information.php. February 1, 2016.
The views, opinions and positions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not represent those of Becker’s Hospital Review/Becker’s Healthcare. The accuracy, completeness and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with them.
