Here are pros and cons to know before you hop on the cloud.
More and more IT companies with little to no experience in health care — but plenty of market share on the Internet — are heading into the HIT business, offering providers and other health care professionals off-site server space where they can maintain patient records. This is known as “cloud computing” — in which providers use web-based software provided by the IT company to access that server space, so that their records exist in the so-called “cloud” of the Internet.
Cloud computing, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, “is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
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August 26th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Dear HIT News:
Thanks for the mention of Practice Fusion. We understand your position regarding data security in the cloud, but would like to point out there is no air-tight, absolutely secure way to store patient data…as providers using legacy client-server EHRs in New Orleans found out after Katrina blew through a few years back.
Practice Fusion is committed to leveraging the $100 million infrastructure of salesforce.com to assure users of our free, Web-based EHR gain unprecedented levels of data safety and security.
Recently our Chief Medical Officer, Robert Rowley concluded a 3-part series on the subject on ehrbloggers.com. with an August 25 piece titled “Medical Data in the Internet Cloud–Data Privacy.” I would urge your readers to have a look at this and the preceeding pieces for an in-depth review of the subject.
Thank you,
Glenn Laffel MD, PhD
Sr. VP, Clinical Affairs
Free, Web-based EHR