Healthcare Providers See IT Industry Headed for the Cloud
More than two-thirds of 242 healthcare provider executives surveyed by Reaction Data said that the IT industry is headed for the cloud.
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- More than two-thirds (70 percent) of 242 healthcare provider executives surveyed by Reaction Data said that the IT industry is headed for the cloud.
Fourteen percent said that cloud computing was an intriguing concept but not ready for prime time in healthcare, and 10 percent said it was overhyped.
Respondents were asked how cloud is superior to an on-premises IT model. The top response was that fewer internal resources are dedicated to supporting cloud than on-premises, followed by moving from capital expenditure to operational expenditure, easier to deploy and upgrade, and helps reduce information security/data loss problems.
The executives identified key considerations when moving to the cloud: data privacy and security (29 percent), performance (26 percent), financial (21 percent), public cloud version private cloud (12 percent), and governance (12 percent).
One medical imaging director said: “Cloud access, at least for PACS [picture archiving and communication systems], expedites patients care and reduces radiation exposure.”
A CIO commented, “Cloud is not a far away thing. We have our 70%-80% of our software in the cloud already, including our EHR.”
Another CIO expressed reservations about using cloud: “Cloud services vendors like to do upgrades, make changes, force changes to keep standardization, all to keep their support costs low. This often does not line up with 24/7 facility. Random outages, maintenance issues, mistakes they make, etc., can quickly erode the value of this type of service. Speed and accuracy [are] of paramount concern, more so than the cost of the technology.”
Healthcare IT More at Ease About Putting Sensitive Data in the Cloud
A recent survey by Datamation found that healthcare IT pros are becoming more comfortable putting sensitive data in the cloud. In fact, many are seeing the cloud as a way to improve their data security.
Twenty-nine percent of the 108 respondents said that reducing costs was their top cloud priority in 2019; 19 percent of respondent said using cloud to access tools for artificial intelligence, machine learning, or big data was a top cloud priority; 10 percent said that streamlining administration was a top priority; and a similar percentage said that expanding mobility deployments was a priority.
Forty-nine percent of respondents said they expect their budget for cloud computing to grow by 10 percent to 25 percent over the next one to two years. Another 14 percent said they anticipate their budget to grow by 25 percent to 50 percent, and 7 percent expect their budget to soar by more than 50 percent. Thirty percent said they assume their cloud computing budget will stay the same or decline.
Seventy percent of respondents said that the applications they deploy to the cloud are mission critical, a major change from only a few years ago.
The survey also found that the use of multicloud is increasing significantly due to concerns about vendor lock-in and a wish to mix and match vendor tools, such as AI, machine learning, and big data analytics.
A majority of respondents said they employ two or more cloud providers, with 23 percent using three or more providers.
“A multicloud strategy gives you a single pane of glass to identify and monitor the data in your various clouds,” explained Dave Dimond, chief technology officer and distinguished engineer at Dell EMC’s Global Healthcare Business.
Technavio recently forecasted that the global healthcare cloud market would reach $16.4 billion in 2022, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 22 percent.
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment is projected to reach 65 percent of the total market by 2022, a 3 percent increase in market share from 2017. Other healthcare cloud market segments expected to grow include infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS).
