More Than 4/5 Healthcare Providers Use Cloud
Healthcare IT has been at the tip of the spear when it comes to cloud innovation. A study published by HIMSS Analytics confirms this trend. The healthcare focused analytics firm queried 150 hospital CIOs in efforts to gather data for this survey entitled: 2014 HIMSS Analytics Cloud Survey.
The 31 page report highlights the importance of cloud computing within the healthcare IT world. Due to data handling restrictions put in place by federal regulations such as HIPAA, healthcare IT departments were some of the earliest adopters of private and hybrid cloud. The report provides readers with insights into the role that cloud plays within the healthcare IT world. For example, the report mentions that 86% of respondents mentioned that they implement SaaS within their environments. Another 79.3% of respondents mentioned that they have a cloud based Disaster Recovery as a Service solution in place.
Unsurprisingly, when the respondents were asked about cloud service providers, the most important factors surrounding CSPs are willingness to enter into operating agreements, security measures that are in place and compliance issues. About 2 of 3 respondents mentioned that business agreements were important in evaluating CSPs. 63.7% of respondents say that the internal and external security of the cloud were top factors and 60.5% of respondents mentioned that legal compliance was at the top of their cloud priority lists.
This report gives outsiders a look at the advances cloud has made within this specific technical niche. Healthcare IT continues to be one of the top cloud employers throughout the technical world and the data shown in this report confirms the direction of the industry. Kyle Murphy, PhD helped author this report and in a separate blog post on EHRIntelligence, he comments on cloud by saying, “The future of cloud services is positive, especially among those health care organizations that already use cloud services.” Murphy also went on to say, “Nearly all of the health care organizations presently using cloud services reported plans to expand use of cloud services in the future.”
