Hospitals and other health care provider organizations are in a bit of a bind of late. They’re faced with stringent data protection regulations on one end, and at the same time they’re encouraged to locate cost-cutting measures to start bringing health care costs somewhere below the level of “spiraling out of control.” One of the measures they’re continually encouraged toward is the adoption of electronic health records, with the federal government going so far as to offer sizable reimbursement to practices adopting electronic systems early. Of course, medical images and patient data take up a lot of space; and the technology infrastructure necessary to hold that data doesn’t come cheap. So what is a health care provider to do? How can you store all this data, provide access to both patients and physicians, and maintain health record security without breaking the bank?
Don over at SearchHealthIT points to the growing popularity of cloud storage among health care providers. There’s still some reluctance among health care providers to hop wholeheartedly onto the cloud, but some specialties are looking eagerly to the cloud. In radiology, for example, medical images take up a lot of space, so a cloud solution makes a lot of sense. As hospitals see the cost-effectiveness of the cloud, as well as the security advances made in the last few years, you can expect to see more of them adopting a cloud solution as a means of lowering costs while increasing ease of access to patient data.
Of course, we wouldn’t be mentioning this if we didn’t have a little something to brag about. ElephantDrive’s services are already HIPAA compliant. That means they’re ready and capable of storing all your health care organization’s sensitive data, and you won’t have to worry about complying with those aforementioned strict regulations.
