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Imagine a mortgage company telling a household it was too slow in moving to the cloud: Cut the cable cord and start streaming! Buy a smart speaker to order pizza! Have backyard security cameras upload footage to the web for review anytime, anywhere! Homeowners might be aghast, insulted or just plain confused by such mandates. Yet that's the world of hospital IT professionals, who feel constant pressure to migrate to the cloud for healthcare activities. I think back to a story I wrote from the HIMSS conference when the former chairman of Alphabet reprimanded the audience about slow-moving cloud projects. In some ways, fighting the cloud movement is a losing battle. Many bank systems have shifted to the cloud, and the savvier financial institutions have figured out a way to make life easier for customers through this change in IT architecture. With cloud for healthcare, the yellow-brick road comes with unique potholes. For starters, some hospitals are spooked by the idea of cloud-based patient data that's not only sensitive, but ...