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What it is – But not how it works!
By Dr. David Edward Marcinko; MBA, CMP™
[Editor-in-Chief]
As commentators, IT pundits, health economists, journalists and so-called experts, we all know that any market is immature when an industry can’t agree on a definition or term-of-art.
Of course, that’s why we just released the Dictionary of Health Information Technology and Security, and several other related works like: Dictionary of Health Insurance and Managed Care – and – Dictionary of Health Economics and Finance.
Of Doctors and Confused Customers and Vendors
The lexicon problem is exacerbated in healthcare IT however, as customers, er-a doctors and medical professionals, still don’t understand what the “computing cloud” or “grid” actually is. This is no doubt important with the recent – and older – governmental pushes toward eHRs, as well as economic bonuses [Medicare 5.1%] for implementation of same.
And, eHR vendors compound the obfuscation when they themselves use the term to describe just about any product they can sell that can be delivered from, or touching a data center. The word “health-cloud” clutters the definitional standardization scene much as the terms “HIPAA”, “HL-7”, and “compliance” did back-in-the day. So, after editing three dictionaries – with a fourth in progress – here goes our modified definition of the “health cloud” with cudos from non-physician colleague Rob Preston of Information Week.
Health-Cloud Defined
The “health-cloud” or “health-cloud computing” refers to:
a highly scaleable health information technology source – hardware, software, CPUs, and storage capacity – that is housed outside of medical data centers, and available on-demand by doctors, patients, payers, government and employers over the Internet, and whose secure variable usage is measured and invoiced incrementally.
Private health clouds mimic those characteristics inside health entity firewalls, but lack the economies-of-scale found in public health clouds.
Assessment
Now that a workable definition has been proposed and we have some definitional clarity, bring on the eHR products and HIT services that physicians can use.
Conclusion
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Filed under: Information Technology, Op-Editorials, Research & Development | Tagged: cloud, grid, PaaS, SaaS | 6 Comments »
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