Imagine a future system where you directly upload your health information, download prescriptions from a doctor, order drugs online and wait for the delivery. This might be part of health care in the future. And the cloud will be one of the biggest contributors for that.
Hospitals and health care professionals are increasingly expanding their footprints to adopt the new technology. Why it’s important? How to leverage it to the best use for patients? How to minimize safety risks and protect sensitive health information? What roles patients can play in this system? Those were among the topics discussed at the “Healthcare Innovation in the Cloud” panel Thursday at the 2016 U.S. News Healthcare of Tomorrow Conference in Washington.
Cloud computing is the trend for collecting and best managing data in the health care industry, say panelists Andrea McGonigle, managing director for Microsoft’s health and life science; Mark Hoffman, chief research information officer at Children’s Mercy Hospital; Dr. Brian Jacobs, chief medical information officer at Children’s National Health System; and Dr. Rasu Shrestha, chief innovation officer for University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
They highlighted the importance of an electronic health record (EHR) system that collects and stores patients’ health information digitally. Jacobs presented how the Bear Institute at Children’s National is providing a platform for health care professionals, programmers, designers, developers, patients and investors working together on innovations. He gave a presentation showing how Children’s National adopts a EHR system in which patients’ information is systematically organized, and it can customize the ways in which patients receive messages from the hospital-through mails, emails or text messages.
Existing challenges in the adoption of the cloud were also discussed. There is no shortage of innovation ideas in the space, said Jacobs, who noted that prioritizing a small portion of those ideas and testing them before getting them into a production environment is the biggest challenge for the innovation center at Children’s National. Shrestha said how to best make sense of health care data has not been tackled yet.
They also addressed the security concerns for the hospitals and research centers and said they are very cautious about the risks. It’s well-known that health information is more valuable for hackers compared with other private information, such as credit card information, because sensitive information in the medical records – Social Security information, for example – is unalterable.
Jacobs said Children’s National receives more than 19 million malicious emails every month.
