with independent physicians, and every-
thing has to happen fast because we’re
dealing with aggressive timelines, either
because they’re regulatory timelines or
we have competitive pressures,” Whyte
says. “While we have the resources to do
this internally, our cloud services partner
brings a lot to the table—they can spin
up data center capacity very quickly, and
they have very skilled human resources
that augment our own staff.”
In addition, that partner, Phoenix-
based ClearDATA Networks Inc., serves
only the health care market, and con-
sequently is steeped in the sometimes
esoteric health security and privacy re-
quirements required, Whyte says.
And while it might not matter in every case and to all providers, the cloud
services also enable Dignity to expand
its I.T. environment using operating
expenses instead of capital outlays for
more servers and other infrastructure,
he adds.
Dignity Health also has found that
many of its new partners, be they competing hospitals, or insurers or independent physicians, want to have all the
collaborative data stored in “neutral”
territory separated from their larger infrastructures, Whyte says.
Not only are there competitive reasons to want to ensure the data is on
neutral ground, but it also means there
are fewer legal and compliance hoops
to jump through to share the necessary
data, which enables the organizations to
speed up the development timelines.
Sharing metrics
One example is the physician metric re-
ports being used for the emerging ACO,
Whyte says. “That’s an application that is
really well-suited for a Web-based cloud
environment: we need to share data
among partners and make it widely acces-
sible to physicians using all different types
of devices to access it.”
Cloud computing at Dignity will grow,
but likely won’t encompass its core legacy
systems, Whyte says. “We are not fork-lift-
ing legacy applications to the cloud: We
use Cerner Corp.’s hosting services for
our EHR, and we have no plans to move
our core financials [from Lawson Corp.]
to a cloud environment. We are using the
cloud for the new types of collaborative
applications we need to offer.”
Collaboration doesn’t necessarily
have to be external, either.
As health systems continue to grow
through consolidation and buying up
visors points out, is built of proprietary
architectures that are not well-suited to
transition into a cloud environment.
“We need to share data
among partners and make it
widely accessible.”
—Scott Whyte
physician practices, the management of
internal data needed for collaborative
efforts is getting more complex.
Jonathan Teich, M.D., the chief medical information officer at Elsevier Corp.
and a practicing physician at Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says
the use of cloud platforms for knowledge is far less daunting than the idea
of changing the entire computing paradigm.
Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based provider of clinical decision support information, plans to soon make a new service
generally available that enables health
systems to manage and maintain their
clinical order sets via a cloud service.
“Health systems with hundreds or
thousands of order sets have a hard
time having local staff maintain them,
and many are widely dispersed, which
makes it more difficult to collaborate,”
Teich says.
That idea of fork-lifting core applica-
tions into a cloud environment is a task
that many providers seem unwilling to
tackle at this point. Much of that big leg-
acy technology, as White from Aspen Ad-
that they’re uncertain they can get from
a cloud platform. If you look across dif-
ferent industries, including the financial
sector, you’re seeing cloud adoption,
but they’re not running their businesses
over the cloud.”
Dan Riskin, M.D., CEO of Menlo Park,
Calif.-based Health Fidelity and consult-
ing assistant professor at Stanford Uni-
versity, says that his is one of a new wave
of health care cloud companies provid-
ing a low-cost bridge to convert data into
knowledge.
