Health IT Forecast: Cloudless
By
John Pulley
Hindered by cultural bias and distrust, the healthcare sector's adoption of cloud computing is probably a decade away, experts say.
Hindered by cultural bias and distrust, the health care sector's adoption of cloud computing is probably a decade away, experts say.
That was the conclusion drawn by IT experts who gathered last week at Harvard Medical School for the Mass High Tech Emerging Technology Forum: Health IT and the Cloud.
"Doctors have a hard time trusting outside vendors with patient data," said Robert Buchanan Jr., CIO of Anna Jacques Hospital in Newburyport, Mass., according to a report by SearchHealthIT.com. "As we move forward, we'll overcome that cultural barrier."
Other industries are rushing to take advantage of cloud computing, which could provide the healthcare sector an efficient means of storing images, accessing Software as a Service (SaaS), adopting electronic health records and practicing telemedicine.
Hamid Tabatabaie, CEO of Life Image Inc., a Massachusetts-based company that allows providers to share medical images online, said competition among healthcare providers and IT vendors has engendered a proprietary mindset that itself impedes the sharing of medical data.
"My prediction is we're 10 years away from having a health IT cloud," Tabatabaie said.