The forecast for healthcare these days seems to be cloudy.
Healthcare IT vendors such as Covisint are looking to the clouds – that is, cloud computing – as the future of application development. Big players like Microsoft and IBM are sharing space in the stratosphere with smaller, niche developers, all looking to push their healthcare products to providers who don’t want to get into the complex, murky businesses of maintaining the technology.
“You’re not going to get physicians to adopt (healthcare IT) via the traditional client-server approach,” said Brett Furst, vice president of Covisint Healthcare, which launched its AppCloud platform last November. “You’re going to have to adopt through the Web.”
AppCloud offers a platform for more than 30 best-of-breed applications, including e-prescribing, labs, radiology reports and e-consults. Providers gain access to the platform through single sign-on technology, and then get to pick and choose what they need.
“Healthcare faces a very specific task of driving technology adoption into the care continuum – a task that has traditionally proven challenging,” Furst added. “The only way to achieve this pervasiveness is by securely delivering solutions via the Web.”
Scott Finlay, president and CEO of Fort Lee, N.J.-based MaxMD, which offers a Web-based e-mail encryption application and manages the healthcare Web domain '.md', calls cloud computing “a pretty capital-efficient solution” for healthcare providers.
“It make sense if you don’t want to incur a huge amount of capital,” he said. “Most provider organizations are revenue-challenged these days – they’re composed of hundreds of thousands of small businesses tied to outdated means of communication. What you do is put a firewall around a top level of the domain … and you have a secure socket layer.”
Facing yet another direction is Benefitfocus, a Charleston, S.C.-based provider of healthcare benefits software for employers, carriers and consumers. Don Taylor, the company’s CTO, sees the payer segment moving toward cloud computing as well.
“Ultimately, all software will be delivered out of the cloud. That’s the way business will be done,” he said. “Everyone is moving toward a service platform where users will be able to modify themselves and the overhead is reduced.”
Cloud computing does have its detractors. Many worry about security and data storage. A recent report from Goldman Sachs contends that while CIOs might be open to more IT spending in the future, most of the money will go into cloud computing, virtualization and open source – leaving less for IT vendors.
“After the initial build-out, cloud computing could drive some headwinds for the IT industry,” said the report, titled “A Paradigm Shift for IT: The Cloud.” The report, however, indicates IT spending could be consolidated in the hands of cloud providers, hosting vendors and large enterprises.
Dave Miller, Covisint’s chief security officer, rebuts the argument that cloud computing poses a security risk.
“Security concerns aren’t any different,” he said. “We’ve gotten very good at securing the transport (of data) and connectivity, so our argument is the cloud supports … security.”
Miller said the biggest risk facing cloud computing in the healthcare field is identifying the end user.
“We’d like physicians to be able to authenticate remotely or identify themselves remotely,” he said. “The user group doesn’t see this as a problem. Physicians don’t see the need for security. That’s a very difficult mindset to get over.”
Finlay says cloud computing isn’t designed to store information, but to move it around. “Healthcare is pretty uniquely suited for it,” he said. “Healthcare is made up of a bunch of islands. Connect them, create a better platform for communication, and you’re basically moving healthcare from the horse-drawn carriage.”
“Collaboration is really going to be the key,” he added. “If you don’t collaborate, you’re really going to run the risk of becoming a legacy application.”
