Speed, scale and security

The initial warning shot came from Eric Schmidt, a technical advisor and former chairman at Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. Schmidt said cloud infrastructures are better set up to handle healthcare data at scale and also offer tighter security from breaches -- and healthcare organizations weren't getting to the cloud fast enough compared to the overall enterprise computing market. Google Cloud Platform sells cloud services and hosting.

"We are a big believer that you have to move to the cloud to get agility and speed," said Vijay Venkatesan, senior vice president and chief data officer at Providence St. Joseph Health in Renton, Wash. The healthcare organization implemented a managed services system in the cloud using SAP HANA, an in-memory computing platform.

Dan Cidon

Cloud migration for healthcare is becoming increasingly necessary because "you can't have these jerry-rigged [on-premises] systems you have today," said Dan Cidon, CTO at vendor NextGate. Moving the cloud "focuses the issue on efficiency, fast setup and API-based transactions."

NextGate, which sells products to improve patient record matching, is itself moving to the cloud using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

John Supra

On-premises setups are a "caged environment," said John Supra, vice president of solutions and services at Care Coordination Institute, a healthcare consultant and services company in Greenville, S.C.  However, the healthcare industry has not fully embraced an open-API world, which makes the move to the cloud slower, Supra said.

Bobby Saxon, CTO of HealthCare.gov -- the federal government site for healthcare insurance exchange through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- has mandated a full move to the cloud for the website by March 31, 2019. Currently, HealthCare.gov has five software applications on a public cloud hosted by AWS.

We are a big believer that you have to move to the cloud to get agility and speed.

"We're all in with the cloud," Saxon said.

Workday, an HR and financial software vendor that exhibited at HIMSS, is already fully cloud-based.

"Moving to the cloud and taking advantage of what vendors can provide with [updating] applications and securing data has tremendous advantages for healthcare," said Keith Lohkamp, senior director of industry strategy at Workday.

For example, automatic patching in the cloud increases security for data and can happen without health IT departments needing to conduct the patching, Lohkamp said.

Aashima Gupta

Security is a complicated debate with healthcare and cloud computing, particularly public cloud platforms. Healthcare IT managers and CIOs have long worried about putting protected health information (PHI) in the cloud, potentially exposing it to threats out of a medical facility's control.

Google Cloud Platform addresses this concern by employing 750 security engineers to guard its infrastructure -- a roster that many healthcare systems could not hire, said Aashima Gupta, global head of healthcare solutions for the company.

Managing health data in the cloud

When considering healthcare and cloud computing, Venkatesan predicted a struggle between vendors and providers about who owns health data. In Venkatesan 's mind, that data should be healthcare's intellectual property, not a cloud provider's, he said.

"We're better off if health systems come together as a consortium [to pool health data] and negotiate with the Amazons and Googles," he added.

Google Cloud Platform's healthcare customers do not cede control of any PHI, Gupta said.

"Hospitals own that data on the cloud. We don't own the data," she added. "Our enterprise customers are concerned about that [control]."

Scott Richert

Some health IT professionals, including Scott Richert, vice president of enterprise infrastructure at Mercy Technology Services, a division of Mercy based in Missouri, don't buy that the cloud can handle the intricate needs of PHI.

"I'll push back a little bit [against the idea] that healthcare shouldn't be as cautious as we are" about the cloud, Richert said. For example, he said, a hospital can't tolerate a drop off, even temporary, in cloud services; rather, healthcare organizations need nonstop connection to a cloud infrastructure to maintain safe patient care.

In his observation, Richert said, there is not enough experience among vendors in managing healthcare workload in the cloud.