Is Cloud Technology the “Next Big Thing” in Healthcare?
February 7, 2013
•Health Sciences, IT and Computer Science
• 0 Comments
By Dr. Rockie McDaniel, Program Chair, Health Sciences and Dr. Janet Durgin, IT Faculty Lead
If you keep up on business and IT news, then you’re probably familiar with the annual trend reports that come out around this time of year. In the past decade, these are the trends that seemed to capture the most buzz:
Any of those sound familiar? The buzz around these trending topics causes every organization to pause, wondering if they’ll miss out on the “next big thing” if they don’t jump on the bandwagon. This year introduced yet another emerging trend – cloud technologies.
Hands down, cloud technology is changing the IT landscape whether we’re ready for it or not. The cloud offers businesses and their IT functions greater flexibility and at a more cost-effective rate, so we can expect this trend to become a mainstay, especially in health care related businesses.
Organizations in the health care industry benefit from cloud in many areas, from data security and resiliency to privacy, and from mobile applications to speed of innovation. Further, cloud infrastructure offers superior uptime compared to what most hospital IT departments can currently provide. Cloud computing allows local, on-site IT staff to focus their efforts on important tasks such as infrastructure maintenance and administration. And that contributes to greater speed of innovation. For health care providers, cloud storage enables staff to have easy access to information anywhere the data needs to be available.
In IT, we work in a constantly changing and moving field. Whether we support health care information systems or not, we cannot afford to fall behind in our education of new and emerging technologies. Ignorance could mean our replacement before we see it coming! If you haven’t already, start beefing up your knowledge on cloud technologies my fellow IT gurus! This technology is here to stay.
Have you found any significant differences supporting cloud technology in the health care industry compared to other industries?
Dr. Rockie McDaniel is the Faculty Chair for the Health Sciences department at CTU. He has 20 years of practice as a Registered Nurse and Advanced Practicing Nurse, both in the U.S. Navy and civilian context, and brings that experience to his work in educating future health care professionals.
Janet Durgin earned her doctorate in Organization and Management, IT Specialty from Capella University in 2005. She brings many years of experience as an Engineering Manager and IT Project Manager in the defense industry to her current role at IT Faculty Lead at CTU.
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