Imaging on the Cloud

Information technology (IT) solutions are becoming critical to hospital operations nowadays. IT is used from electronic health records for sharing patient information among providers, to systems that improve clinician's efficiency and quality of care. It fastens by the diagnosis and determines the best treatments.

To be able to deliver coordinated care and better patient experience the healthcare industry needs to overcome many challenges including, full integration and interoperability of diverse systems to support data sharing. Cloud computing can be widely and effectively used as a solution for this. Cloud computing is a menu of computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. Benefits of cloud solutions include:

• Scalable storage which improves efficiency and enables easy and secure access by clinicians
• Disaster recovery
• Cost savings
• Ongoing maintenance and upgrades with little or no discontinuance
• Improved security

 Radiology departments are leading the charge with respect to cloud adoption for image management and access. Radiology is increasingly dealing with large imaging data sets, complex algorithms, pre- and post-processing requirements. Cloud data grids perform much more efficiently compared to hard drives because the memory is shared between data centers.

Furthermore, cloud deployments can also be fast, and can also be more effectively and consistently managed across the healthcare enterprise. Cloud is also enabling secure and convenient sharing of patient images and report data across multiple locations.

Cloud-based deployments bring a more robust and sophisticated security strategy. The technologies and tools available today to address the many concerns surrounding patient privacy. Also, it is important to not be complacent in this regard, so it is good to opt for private clouds, enabling a tighter level of control over data, and network security.