Netgain

In Part I of The Benefits of Moving to the Cloud, we discussed how cost effective, scalable, and secure it is to implement a cloud solution for your healthcare Information Technology (IT) needs. While these are great benefits, there are even more reasons a cloud IT solution is ideal for small hospitals and offices with multiple physicians who are short on IT staff, but high on demand for quality healthcare services.

Here are the rest of the six benefits of moving to a cloud computing solution:

4. Easy to Implement - You probably don't want to spend a lot of time implementing a complex infrastructure to run your clinical applications.  A cloud solution will quickly provide you the platform and support your staff requires to operate your application.  Your cloud provider can quickly implement your applications in their data center without interrupting other areas of your healthcare business.  Plus, it doesn't require the installation of complex hardware and enhanced security systems in your practice. 

5. Easy to Update - No matter what IT system is in place, they often require updates, whether to increase security, add more features, or to get the latest released version.  Updates can interrupt your business flow if they aren’t rolled out correctly, and often in-house staff is not trained to deal with the new software glitches that can result from an improper rollout.  By opting for a cloud-based solution, updates are someone else’s problem.  It becomes the responsibility of the cloud-based IT provider to maintain updated hardware and software programs.  These software updates are then shared with the customers.  They can be scheduled at times that are convenient for your business, when it doesn’t impact the rest of your services.  You’ll have a team of expert IT professionals working to ensure that you get instant, knowledgeable, support before, during, and after the update. This, from people who have rolled out numerous updates in the past.

6. Highly Interoperable - One of the problems with HIT currently, is that there are a number of different systems in the marketplace that operate differently and cannot communicate well with each other.  This makes it difficult for medical records and personal information to be transmitted from one hospital to another, from one physician practice to another, or between physician practices and hospitals using different software products.  A major advantage of using a cloud computing solution is that, because it uses the internet, this problem of interoperability is overcome.  If the practice, or the hospital, can access the internet, they can obtain access to the information that is wished to be shared with them.  Sending follow-up information from a specialist office back to a referring physician becomes as simple as sending an email.  Similarly, exchanging critical patient information with a hospital becomes quick and easy.

Conclusion

So here are six major benefits of moving to the cloud for the health IT solutions you might require for your healthcare facility:

1. Cost
2. Scalability
3. Security
4. Ease of implementation
5. Easy to update, and
6. Interoperability

Netgain is a well-established IT solutions provider.  We focus on making the benefits of cloud-based computing available to physician practices and smaller (rural) hospitals that can ill-afford the large costs associated with on-site IT hardware, software and physical facility/security needs.  We would be happy to discuss your Healthcare IT issues with you to determine if we might provide an adequate solution for your needs.  Call us at 877-797-4700 or go to the Contact page of our website.

Image courtesy of: ddpavumba