Venyu Blog

As the medical industry embraces EMR (Electronic Medical Records) and absorbs the demands of patient-centric privacy standards including HIPAA and HITECH, individual practices are beginning to take a critical look at migrating select patient data to the cloud using Software as a Service (SaaS).

As detailed in this essay by Pamela Lewis Dolan in American Medical News, “Cloud Computing: Is it right for your practice?” there are several key factors physicians should take into account in evaluating the benefits of making the leap from onsite recordkeeping to offsite, cloud-based computing. These include:

• Cost. Generally, all physician practices would need to use a cloud-based EMR system are workstations with computers that have an Internet connection. Because the infrastructure is maintained outside the practice, upgrades or downgrades to the network — for increased or reduced bandwidth and data storage, for example — can be made on an as-needed basis at any time.

• Speed and storage. Lewis-Dolan, through expert opinion, concedes pushing particular services through the cloud might not be the same, in terms of type of response expected, in running that same service or application internally, however, the needed speed, as well as the amount of storage required, can be adjusted at any time, which is an advantage.

• Maintenance. A virtually maintenance-free infrastructure, where vendors take care of all maintenance off-site, online backup and recovery can be especially valuable, especially in terms of a vendor’s backup facilities that can take over and keep a practice online when the primary locations is knocked off-line in the face of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.  (On this point I have to commend the author on her luminous observation that physicians attend medical school to keep patients, rather than and IT infrastructure healthy and in light of that truism alone, cloud computing is worth a closer look).

• Access. When data is in the cloud it can be accessed from nearly anywhere, using any Web-enabled device.

• Data protection and ownership. Despite the uneasiness many feel about storing data off-site, the cloud can be safer to store private information than an in-office server, analysts said. Servers in physician practices run the risk of being stolen. Even though the data presumably would be backed up at a practice, many cloud system providers have multiple backup facilities, so the data are less likely to become permanently lost if something goes wrong.

Cloud computing is quickly gaining acceptance, practice by practice, throughout the medical industry. In fact, Lewis-Dolan found that 32% of the health care industry is using cloud-based applications, and 73% of those are planning to add more applications to the cloud in the future.

If EMR and rapid patient data recovery is becoming increasingly important in your day-to-day practice, Venyu and its backup and compliance services might just represent the best possible outcome both for them, and for you.