The Cloud And Health Care IT: What You Need To Know

Featured article by Steven Freitag, Business Analyst and vCIO of Gordon Flesch Company

According to Healthcare IT News, more than 80 percent of doctors now use electronic health records (EHRs) to create, store and transfer patient data. Many EHR systems rely on cloud computing rather than local stacks to both increase the speed of collaboration and reduce the strain on local servers. For health care agencies, however, moving to the cloud comes with significant organizational challenges in addition to big benefits. Here’s what you need to know about three of the most common.

Compliance Concerns

The success of EHRs and other tech-enabled health care advancements — think network-connected devices and wearable technologies — depends on rigorous adherence to compliance standards — such as HIPAA for data protection and Health Level Seven (HL7) for the “exchange, integration, sharing and retrieval of electronic health information.” Although necessary, it can be difficult to implement these standards across your organization, and many companies consider the adoption of cloud technology as one more complication in the process; how can you be sure the cloud vendor meets government-mandated standards, and what happens if it doesn’t?

As noted by Managed Healthcare Executive, however, in many cases health care-focused cloud providers are actually better at meeting compliance challenges than local IT departments. Why? Because this is what they do all day, every day. While local IT pros are tasked with tracking network problems, spinning up new appliances and working out network performance issues, cloud providers have a single purpose: supply on-demand resources that meet client needs. As a result, they’ve become very good at meeting compliance expectations.

Security Slip-Ups

Managing security is another concern for health care agencies considering a move to the cloud. After all, if your data isn’t kept on local stacks, doesn’t that naturally put it at greater risk? As recent breaches indicate, however, in-house servers are by no means Fort Knox when it comes to stopping malicious actors: Millions of records were compromised in 2015 as health care IT security was shown as lacking compared to many other industries. Here, the cloud in and of itself doesn’t answer the security challenge but is your first step to better protection: By combining total transparency of data access with high-level encryption whenever records are moved or changed, health care companies can take the bull by the horns and limit the chances of data loss.

Legal Challenges

According to Network World, some of the biggest challenges facing health agencies moving to the cloud stem from legal concerns. What happens in the event of a data breach — how much of the cost is your provider willing to pay? No cloud vendor will sign any indemnification clause without a cap, but many providers will agree to pay breach-related costs for one year. With your reputation on the line — even if a provider drops the ball — this kind of legal-IT thinking is mandatory. Assurances of safe data are only valid until hackers devise a new app attack vector or discover firmware flaws. Bottom line? If you’re moving to the cloud, don’t sideline legal concerns.

There’s big potential for health care in the cloud — if you’re ready to tackle the trifecta of compliance, security and legal challenges.

Steven Freitag, Business Analyst and vCIO of Gordon Flesch Company, has nearly 12 years of experience working across a number of differently sized businesses and verticals. He began his career at a corporate help desk and worked his way through the ranks. Today he specializes in data security where he’s able to help customers pinpoint and solve their various pain points.