Impact of Cloud Computing on Healthcare

Questions: 1. Ascertain the importance of information management for the company or industry that you have chosen. 2. Analyze the fundamental impact of IT architecture or enterprise architecture on information management for your chosen company or industry. Determine if IT architecture impacts the effectiveness or efficiency of information management and vice versa. 3. Suggest at least two (2) data storage methods regarding database, data warehouse, and / or date mart for your chosen company or industry. Provide a rationale for your response. 4. Determine the optimal data storage method between the methods that you suggested in Question 3. Provide a rationale for your response. Answers: 1. The chosen industry in this case is Healthcare industry. Its among the most prominent industry where information management is a critical part. In the case of a healthcare organization, their information management is typically handled by a specialized information system known as the Hospital Information System or HIS. Its essentially an information system which is able to manage all kinds of information that allows healthcare providers be able to do their jobs effectively. Such information management practices have existed since a long time albeit in a limited manner. The practice of managing information using information system in healthcare industry dates back to the 1960s. However, both the practice of managing information as well as the information itself has gotten extremely diverse, complicated and large since then. A modern hospital information system typically includes many different applications tied up in a single system that take cares of the needs of different departm ents within the hospital. They are able to manage data related to clinic, the laboratory, the nursing department, the finance department, the radiology, pathology, diagnostic and more such department. These hospitals require information quickly and nearly instantly. Their information needs include retrieving patients data nearly instantly which in itself could include data and infographics such as gender, age, demographics, patients history, data aggregated by different health devices owned by the patient, tests performed by the patient among others. The care provider should be able to retrieve all of these data with one single click including patients data, data from finance systems, distribution of medications among others. Larger hospitals have more than 200 different systems combined and aggregated into one single information system. Benefits of using a capable information management system can be as follows: Enhanced integrity of information. Reduced errors in transcriptions. Optimized reports turnaround time. Reduced duplication of entries. Apart from the above, the following benefits should also be realized: Relieve stress on the current staff Instant retrieval of information Timely decision-making capabilities for effective treatment. Information sharing among different departments, doctors and even other specialists across the world. Ability to quickly access DICOM images Ability to be device independent if the information management system is cloud based. Easy database backup and disaster recovery solutions Stronger encryption and a secured database storage. 2. Impact of IT architecture or enterprise architecture on information management in hospital industry As the implementation of Information management increases in hospitals, the strategic role of IT also gets increased, complexed and demands for change. As a result of which, IT management should be able to deal with uncertainties, complexities and changing requirements. In this case, Enterprise Architecture plays an important role in IT management practice. According to the (Pessi, 2012), the enterprise architecture creates a strong alignment between the capabilities of information system architecture and the ever growing demands and data of hospital business architecture. Enterprise architecture provides in-depth details of AS-IS details of current system. It also provides the insights on future TO-BE system (Loundermon, 2016). In healthcare industry, EA will allow hospitals to find the inefficient patient monitoring systems. The roadmap of EA depicts clear budget, schedules, risks and dependencies of proposed systems. In addition to this, EA provides a better understanding of Infor mation Technology investments opportunities to executive leadership, IT managers and governing teams. EA also helps in formulating the initiative in healthcare industry. IT also facilitates information sharing and management, application development, deployment, ongoing operations and also defines the documentation processes, technical standards, etc. All of them define and maintain the operating environment of company. 3. According to the survey conducted by HIMSS Analytics, following are key data storage methods being used in hospitals and health systems: Storage area network system External storage media i.e. tapes or discs Vendor solution or outsourced storage Network attached storage system cloud computing Direct attached storage system Among the above mentioned methods, Storage Area Network and Cloud computing are best options for healthcare industry (Freewimaxinfo.com, 2016). The healthcare industry contains huge quantity of data which are required to be stored in a way that data retrieval can be carried out in a faster and reliable manner. The Storage area network is created by attaching the data storage medias like disk arrays and tapes to the centralized server. This makes the storage media to be confined to the operating environment known as storage area network. SAN allows sharing of storage devices and also frees user from handling the physical cables and storage devices. In addition to this, servers can be rebooted from SAN independently. This makes the replacement server to use the logical number unit of the defective layer. The cost of implementation of SAN has dropped to a considerable level and now can be afforded by small hospitals as well. Second data storage option is cloud technology. It is defined as the computing being done on internet. It consists of various serves, platform, infrastructure and other computing resources. In the cloud environment, the information is being sent by digitized system in the form of service. Cloud computing allows users to pay only for the service they have used depending upon their requirement. The users are not required to possess any prior knowledge of using them. As result of which users can concentrate more on the business processes rather than focusing on the management of third party concerns. 4. Cloud based database solution is the chosen method of the two method proposed earlier. This is because a cloud based database solution offers many benefits over the second method pertaining to healthcare sector. The doctors clinics, the health clinics, the hospitals all require access to large storage and computing facilities that are not provided via traditional offerings (Cloud-council, 2012). On top of this, healthcare data needs to be available to all in real-time i.e., it should be shared across different facilities and even different geographical regions which makes cloud based database solution the better option of the two. This is because the cloud based solutions offers healthcare organization opportunities to improve upon their services, and allows to share information critical to the hospital and patient almost instantly. Similarly, clinical research which is a big domain within healthcare industry are just now starting to make use of the cloud to improve their research and drug development process. The explosion of data being generated from various sources such as the genome sequencing as well as the growing relevance of biologics in medical research process is opening up a huge opportunity for R D and this is where cloud based database and cloud computing technologies are excelling. Simultaneously, cloud technology is able to support team based care delivery as well as collaboration and also the ability to make use of application based on different model requirements as well as common set of clinical information. Simultaneously, cloud based database solutions and cloud computing are increasingly beneficent for telemedicine which is newer domain in medical field. Cloud technologies are also being used for healthcare analytics purposes. This is because on a large population scale various insights and information is available in real-time. This ensure that most recent and complete clinical insights and knowledge are available to all support care p roviders. This ensures they take quick decisions and are able to focus on value creation which improves outcomes rather than consumption. Lastly, health information exchange which can be enabled by this type of data storage solutions can help healthcare organization to be able to share their data contained in otherwise proprietary EHR systems. References Cloud-council,. (2012).Impact of Cloud Computing on Healthcare. Retrieved 28 January 2016, from https://www.cloud-council.org/deliverables/CSCC-Impact-of-Cloud-Computing-on-Healthcare.pdf Freewimaxinfo.com,. (2016).What is SAN - Storage Area Network - How SAN works. Retrieved 28 January 2016, from https://freewimaxinfo.com/storage-area-network-san.html Loundermon, M. (2016).Exostrategies - When Enterprise Failure Is Not An Option.Exostrategies. Retrieved 28 January 2016, from https://www.exostrategies.com/why-enterprise-architecture/ Pessi, K. (2012).Enterprise Architecture Principles and their impact on the Management of IT Investments.Ejise. Retrieved 28 January 2016, from https://www.ejise.com/issue/download.html?idArticle=700