Cloud computing comes with many promises of efficiencies to be gained and benefits to be unearthed. At Children’s National Health System, information systems staff were able to help return 30 minutes of time a day to nurses – time the nurses could stop spending with IT and, instead, invest with patients.
“A good example of benefits that materialized around cloud computing has been working with our caregivers to make data access easier while maintaining security around the data,” said Chad Wilson, director of information security at Children’s National Health System. “Working with our caregivers, we have been able to return time back to them by putting in a system that has ease of access and accomplishes identified use-cases but still maintains privacy and security around the information.”
On the front-end of the cloud-based clinical information system, the hospital implemented a badge-tap that incorporates a multi-factor authentication model. This gets caregivers into the EHR within roughly 15 seconds compared with the previous 90 seconds.
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“And that provides two-factor authentication for the EHR but also is married up with our computer services that give caregivers a better user experience, faster response times, and a single platform to access all clinical data,” Wilson said. “It returned 30 minutes back to every nurse. Because the log-in time before took a lot longer. We have it down to 15 seconds for initial log-in and 9-11 seconds for every subsequent log-in. It was taking 90 seconds before to get from the time the machine was started to the time you were able to log-in and then a couple minutes to authenticate through all the systems.”
Wilson will be speaking on the benefits and challenges of cloud computing at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Cloud Computing Forum in Orlando, Florida, on February 19, during the 2017 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition. Wilson’s session is entitled “Secure Cloud Computing in Healthcare - the Challenge and the Promise.”
Wilson said the healthcare organization has a very robust cloud computing implementation that is a hybrid of public clouds (those operated by vendors) and private clouds (those built in-house). “We host a number of services in-house through our data centers, but we also have some very large implementations that are public cloud types,” he added.
Wilson cautions that one of the biggest challenges in cloud computing is the contract that a healthcare organization signs with a vendor for cloud-based services.
“Cloud is a great buzzword, but it’s just a contract with a vendor,” he said. “So make sure the contract is fully vetted and identifies all the services and all of the concerns and SLAs associated with the services you are standing up, as well as the security of the data that is either remote hosted or part of an application in your private cloud internally. The devil is in the details, it’s the contract you have to pay attention to.”
HIMSS17 runs from Feb. 19-23, 2017 at the Orange County Convention Center.
This article is part of our ongoing coverage of HIMSS17. Visit Destination HIMSS17 for previews, reporting live from the show floor and after the conference.
