By Michael Brown 1

The reach of the cloud stretches over all industries in the modern world.  However, the concept is newer to some industries than it is to others.  As was recently discussed by HealthData Management, the healthcare industry is one of those that is dragging behind many others in terms of cloud adoption.  According to a 2013 survey by direct market reseller CDW, healthcare ranks seventh out of eight sectors in their adoption of cloud services, edging out implementation only by state and local governments—barely. It's something that MSPs who offer cloud-based file sharing services should watch.

As far behind as healthcare currently stands in comparison to other industries, managed services providers (MSPs) can note that the shift in this process is happening at a very swift pace.  A survey conducted by HIMSS Analytics in June 2014 yielded findings that 83 percent of surveyed medical practices, hospitals, and healthcare systems were using cloud services.  The 83 percent spoke highly of the cloud, citing lower maintenance costs, speed of deployment, and lack of internal staffing resources.

“The very nature of what you are after in cloud computing is the ability to dynamically expand your compute capacity in real time,” explained Keith Dunleavy, M.D., CEO of data analytics vendor Inovalon.  “To have the compute capacity to do that on-demand, you need a very flexible computing stack to handle that computation.”

All of those benefits of cloud computing noted by Dunleavy and the 83 percent of adopters in the medical field hold true across all business landscapes, so why is it taking longer for this industry to catch on?

Just like the benefits of cloud computing, the barriers-to-entry are the same for the healthcare industry as they also are elsewhere.  With vast amounts of private data, security issues are of the utmost importance.  Similarly, performance issues and issues of technical integration with legacy systems have thus far impeded cloud adaptation.

Yet, that doesn’t mean that organizations in the health and medical industry aren’t interested in adopting cloud services, says Damon Auer, vice president of healthcare practice for Tribridge, a technology services firm.

“Given the accountable care [and] coordinated set of processes we’ve seen in the last two-and-a-half years, roughly half of healthcare executives we talk to express a preference for a cloud-based solution,” reports Auer.  “They see some speed-to-solution advantage in moving to the cloud.”

Because of electronic health records (EHRs), imaging, and other highly diverse patient data sources, the average hospital generates about 60 GBs of data per bed per year.  This presents a giant opportunity for MSPs to onboard health and medical clients by striking while the iron is hot.

How hot is the iron?  Rob Rizk, the IT director of the non-profit Good Shepherd Health Care System, notes that his hospital already handles roughly 25 TB of data and will likely be adding another 15 TB over the next two or three years.

“The growth has to do with new applications and additional patient information,” Rizk says.  He later summed it up in a way that should capture the attention of all MSPs.  “We’re going to be moving to some video-imaging in our surgical center, so I expect rapid growth in that area.”

Expect rapid cloud-utilization growth across the board in the health and medical industry.