“There was a time when every household, town, farm or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap; cloud computing works in a similar fashion. When the tap isn’t on, you aren’t paying for resources you don’t currently need.”

–Vivek Kundra, CIO, United States Government

The term “cloud computing” refers to the on-demand availability of computer system resources like data storage or computing power with little to no management required by the user. The term “cloud” is typically used to describe data centers available to many users over the internet, distributed over multiple locations from central servers.

More healthcare providers are opting to work with vendors that provide cloud computing solutions for their digital records than ever before. Being able to store information securely off site is viewed as a large benefit for both large and small provider organizations.

The Benefits of Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Cost Reduction: No need to invest heavily in a large infrastructure.

Healthcare Data Security: Most provider organizations lack the scale to maintain a rigorous security infrastructure.

Scalability: As provider organizations grow with cloud solutions, investments are incremental, and you can scale quickly and easily.

Disaster Recovery: Data loss prevention is a key patient safety issue for provider organizations. Storing your data in the cloud guarantees that data is available even if your office equipment is damaged, which mitigates the risk of data loss in the event of a disaster.

Healthcare Data Security in a Public Cloud

One of the major concerns of healthcare providers, regardless of size, is healthcare data security. Data breaches and other cyber crimes can devastate a company's revenue, threaten patient safety and degrade the provider’s reputation. Cloud computing in healthcare offers many ways to maintain security of health information and guarantees that healthcare data security standards are upheld. Some key healthcare data security capabilities include:

Infrastructure Security

Advanced network equipment and firewalls
Connectivity choices for private or dedicated connections from your office or on-site environment
Automatic encryption and HIPAA compliant, secure data transmission
Scalable redundancy, failover and disaster recovery capabilities.

Data Encryption

Data at rest encryption capabilities are available in most cloud services.
Flexible key management options
Encrypted messaging and secure transmission of sensitive data that meet HIPAA and NIST standards are available with most cloud service providers.
Identity and Access Control: Most cloud providers will provide capabilities to define, enforce, and manage user access policies (Identity Access Management, SSO (Single Sign-On) and Active Directory service).

Monitoring and Logging

One of the benefits of cloud computing in healthcare is that they will provide all of the necessary anti-malware and anti-intrusion tools to protect your data. In addition, there are tools to manage and automate the review of logs and notifications.
Cloud computing in healthcare services will provide automation tools that are easy to use and adopt to create monitoring systems that manage your infrastructure. There are also many third party commercial tools to facilitate these activities.

Scalability

A majority (57%) of physicians practice in groups with less than 10 providers. The HIPAA Security Rule was implemented in 2005, and as healthcare data security standards continue to grow, it is becoming increasingly difficult for small provider organizations to maintain adequate compliance. Different companies of different sizes have different healthcare technology needs. For example, a large hospital system has different needs than a solo practitioner. Using cloud computing in healthcare is a great solution for both organizations because it enables their IT departments to efficiently and quickly scale up or down, according to their business demands.

Scalability reduces the risks associated with managing in-house issues and daily maintenance. You have the latest resources available with professional solutions and no up-front investment. Scalability is probably one of the greatest benefits of cloud computing in healthcare. Additionally, cloud based solutions are ideal for growing businesses with demands for a more flexible and dynamic infrastructure. If your business demands or patient data security needs increase, you can easily increase your cloud capacity without having to invest in physical infrastructure. This level of flexibility can give businesses using cloud computing in healthcare a major asset over their competitors.

Data Loss Prevention & Patient Safety

Data managed in the cloud can be easily stored, recovered, or processed with minimal effort required. Advanced data loss tools and strategies enabled by cloud providers reduces patient data security risks that are caused by data loss. Medical providers now have new ways to maintain security of health information and improve secure access to their patient, via any devices of their choice, in any corner of the world, as long as there is a secure connection to the internet. In the past, medical offices that stored their own data onsite had much greater healthcare data security risk with maintaining physical security and investing in business continuity. This saves valuable resources in maintaining the systems which reduces the IT workloads.

Major Cloud Computing Providers

Because of all the benefits of cloud computing in healthcare explained above cloud computing is a fast growing trend. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are the dominant players in providing types of cloud computing in healthcare services that software vendors and healthcare enterprises desire. This market is known as the Infrastructure as a Service market (IaaS) and according to Gartner, is a market estimated to be worth a total of $64 billion by 2021, up from $50 billion in 2020, according to research firm Gartner's latest figures. It is a market that has been dominated by AWS since it created the sector in 2006. AWS is the established market leader globally for public IaaS and PaaS market share.

ForeSee Medical utilizes Amazon Web Services because of its healthcare data security standards, advanced ecosystem, and market leadership. Our internal team of healthcare data security experts developed the infrastructure and policies designed to protect the patient data processed by our HCC risk adjustment coding software. We maintain and review, at regular intervals, our information and risk management programs for integrity and optimal performance. Workforce and physical security, vulnerability scans, employee training, contingency planning, and risk assessments are all key components of our security scheme designed to protect your patient data.

Are you looking to extract actionable insights from your patient data using software supported by the market leader in healthcare data security? ForeSee Medical can empower you with insightful HCC risk adjustment coding support, and integrate it seamlessly with your EHR.

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Blog by: The ForeSee Medical Team