June 15, 2010 11:15 AM

Healthcare providers have an opportunity to take advantage of new, advanced technology in cloud computing.  Given the heavy industry regulation, it is important for health professionals to determine if cloud computing can provide them a secure, reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform that can be used to facilitate healthcare customers’ HIPAA-compliant applications and data.

HIPAA, which protects the privacy and security of certain health information, is a national standard that all healthcare providers need to be compliant with to secure “protected health information” (PHI).

Some key steps to preparing your organization for the cloud include the following:

1. Rationalizing, simplifying, standardizing and reducing your organization’s application portfolio
2. Implementing virtualization technologies at all levels to create a portable environment ready for the cloud
3. Developing a cloud computing strategy to help identify business value drivers, service impact, and service capability
4. Creating a corporate risk profile for cloud computing adoption
5. Deciding where to place healthcare applications and data taking into account characteristics such as business importance, data sensitivity, processing security, and regulatory constraints
6. Develop business case and determine the transformational roadmap to being the process of moving healthcare data to the cloud

As the “Great Healthcare Debate” continues the acceptance of cloud computing solutions – even in privacy and security-focused industries – is gaining traction. If implemented properly, the cloud provides a computing platform that can be used to facilitate a growing healthcare customers’ HIPAA-compliant industry and healthcare applications. In my next post I will address how healthcare businesses subject to HIPAA should carefully select a service provider with the capabilities to address HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Audit as well as provide secure, scalable, low cost IT infrastructure.

Originally posted by Jim Kane, Director, CIO Services and David McCament, Director, Healthcare/Payer Provider on Consider the Source

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TPI is the leader in guiding organizations through effective, lasting transformation of their business support operations. Around the globe we have helped hundreds of clients reduce operating risks, streamline complex operations, improve the cost of support functions, achieve sustainable improvements and make competitive gains. Decisions to change and successful transition of existing operations to new service delivery models is hard — and replete with risks. While the decisions are never formulaic, the hard-earned lessons of hundreds of prior evaluations are invaluable.

Posted by Sue Ansell at June 15, 2010 11:15 AM

Categories: Cloud computing eHealth Trends

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