Hospital datacenters: Extinct in 5 years?

Prominent healthcare executives are predicting a drastic shift from on-premise IT infrastructure into the cloud. That includes electronic health records, clinical decision support and analytics.

Today one would be hard-pressed to find a fistful of companies that consider generating their own power a competitive advantage — some hospital systems, rather, are harnessing cloud infrastructure services to innovate in ways they could not if they needed to build or buy adequate storage and compute power.

A similar shift is underway in healthcare, said James Lawson, chief solutions officer at Verge Health, a risk management vendor.

“Several years ago it was ‘you’re crazy if you think we’ll put patient data in the cloud,'” Lawson said. “Today, it’s ‘you’re crazy if you think you’re going to put patient data in my servers.'”

And while Lawson said a wholesale shift to the cloud may take longer than five years, he explained that once the move gains steam, inert hospitals risk falling behind technologically.

“When you’re the last man standing with a datacenter, and your competitors are using that capital to generate revenue, the upside of moving to the cloud will become crystal clear,” Lawson added.

Read the full article at HealthcareITNews.com