Cloud Computing Reduces Costs

Taken from http://blogs.computerworld.com/16534/the_real_costs_of_healthcare:

The health care industry has always been a leader when it comes to leveraging technical innovation to provide better quality services. Wonders such as Computer-Aided Tomography (CAT) scans, sonograms and even nuclear medical imaging technology allow doctors to peer inside the human body and diagnose problems, without the need for expensive and intrusive surgery.

Although the cost of these highly technical machines can be high, they enable doctors to diagnose illnesses without the need for risky and costly surgery, which minimizes the hospital stay to recuperate, which in turn reduces those costs.

So why are health care costs still rising? Shouldn't they actually be going down?  Inefficiency drives up costs, and inefficiency in information technology can be a major factor in higher costs.

Why is this the case?

As the population grows, so does the need to keep medical records. From the time you are born to the time you die, a record needs to be kept and stored for every tooth pulled, tonsil removed or other medical procedure performed. Government regulations also dictate that doctors, hospitals and insurance companies keep these patient records available for many years, if not forever.

The problem arises from the fact that in many cases the same doctors who perform highly technical, lifesaving procedures in the hospital may still be storing patient records on paper in their office.

Have you ever tried to change your primary care physician? Have you ever had to pick up an X-ray from one doctor and deliver it to a specialist? It seems any time I or my family members change or see a new doctor or specialist, they always ask me to fill out a new chart with my insurance information, family history and medical history. Why can't the specialist just download that information from the primary care physician's office?
All of this wasted time and duplication of efforts drives up costs and adds inefficiency. Think of all the wasted office space dedicated to storing patient records!

Physicians could reduce their costs in office space and personnel and become much more efficient and secure in sharing patient data between other providers by outsourcing the storage of patient record data to a cloud service provider. One way I see for this to happen quickly is for hospitals to become the IT cloud service providers for their affiliated physicians. 

Each affiliated doctor would procure application and patient records services from a central IT department at the hospital. The physicians would scan all their records into an appliance in their office where the data would be encrypted and deduplicated prior to transmission into the cloud. Patients and doctors could access the records securely by exchanging secure electronic keys, similar to the way secure credit card transactions occur over the internet.

The doctors would use the appliance in their office to input and retrieve records. Patient records could be securely transferred between physicians and specialists by providing access to the key, and hospitals could transmit and store data in a secure fashion between their affiliated physicians and even other hospitals.

Hospitals that sign up for this could transform their IT departments from a cost center into a new stream of revenue, enable their affiliated doctors to reduce the costly burden of having their own IT staff, and provide a simple means for them to cost effectively achieve regulatory compliance for their patient records.

Some hospitals are already seeing the light and getting on board. For instance, Steve Aylward, general manager of U.S. Health & Life Sciences writes on The Official Microsoft Blog about how cloud computing promises enormous benefits for the health care world.

My hope is that soon practices such as these are standardized around the world so that we all can benefit.

A centralized national EMR solution remains the primary goal of healthcare today.  This article shows us how we might be able to achieve that using cloud technology as a means of accessing patient medical records from anywhere in the world.  Of course, in order for this to work, a computing language standard must be put in place so that different EMR applications can access and decrypt the data.  Perhaps the government can create and develop its own cloud for this purpose.