Posts Tagged ‘Cloud Computing’
2012 Predictions for Health IT
January 2, 2012
Like others (see Daniel Kraft) , I have my own opinions about what trends will be most influential for health IT in 2012.
- Big Data and real-time analytics and decision support – IBM Watson and Explorys are in this space, others will follow and adoption will grow enabled by cloud computing, NOSQL/Hadoop and natural language processing
- Continued focus on EMR adoption as more health systems pursue meaningful use. This will again be the main focus at HIMSS as well as other conferences
- Social media in health care will continue to grow among patients as the e-Patient movement continues to gain in strength and public awareness and as advocates like the Reshape Innovation Center find creative uses to influence the future of health
- Mobile health and apps usage will expand but what is needed is a way to integrate personal health information, such as, PHRs and apps that promote wellness and disease management. For health care professionals, apps and mobile devices need to be integrated into clinical workflow rather than being an adjunct or distraction
- Research will be further enabled by EMR data as more academic medical centers develop data warehouses for research and quality studies and as initiatives like QueryHealth make it possible to combine data across systems and states using health information exchange and other tools
There are many more but these are the primary one’s I will be following.
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A year in Review Perspective from Higher Education
January 6, 2011
Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve University, has written 2011: The Year Ahead in IT, a fresh perspective looking forward instead of back. There are many parallels to healthcare.
1. The Big Picture: The State of the Global Economy and What It Means for IT on U.S. College Campuses (or, globalization and localization). He says that universities are tied to the cities they live in and community partnerships are crucial for global competitiveness. The same could be said for urban and academic medical centers.
2. How do you spell opportunity? A-U-S-T-E-R-I-T-Y (shared services and entrepreneurship). With greater austerity in health care, shared services and making IT a profit center through entrepreneurship are key to IT survival in healthcare as well.
3. Operational Excellence Is Good Enough (leveraging the cloud for strategic reengagement). Instead of a focus on operational excellence, moving toward cloud-based services and software/platform as a service. Healthcare continues to be skittish about the cloud but with the appropriate SLAs and security, may provide appropriate solutions.
4. We Go to University to Learn (mobility, simulations, gaming, and unified communications). Best quote: “While the rhetorical debates will continue, blended learning models based on hybrid pedagogies of face-to-face interactions with online exploration, discovery, reflection and mentoring are emergent realities.” This is emerging in education of health professionals and more experimentation should be welcomed.
5. Content is King… No, No, Platform Is King … No, No (learning management, publishing, and learning middleware). Another quote: “Given the maturity of the traditional course management platforms, the lethargic character of the academic publishing industry satisfied with its annuities in traditional textbooks, and the early state of e-books for learning, a new set of players in the area of student engagement, assessment, and support is likely to offer to stitch together the layers between the content and platform providers.”
6. I Used to Walk 10 Miles in Snowshoes to School (rich media and 21st-century learning). The move from text-centric learning to video conference, multimedia learning and more. The possibilities in healthcare are apparent and some are being utilized with YouTube and 3D anatomical models. Will holograms be next?
7. If We Hang In There We Will See an ROI on Our 8- and 9-Figure ERP Implementations (new models for administrative systems). Expensive enterprise systems moving to SaaS platforms changing the legacy of large implementations into short cycles of outsourced applications.
8. Consumer Sovereignty Can Be Stopped at the Gates of the Campus (governance and enterprise program management]. Sounds alot like centralized healthcare IT departments. “Frustration with the lack of agility, available resources and talents has led to a growing position that IT needs to get out of the way other than provisioning reliable network access, limited security and related regulatory and risk-mitigation roles.”
9. Overcoming the Myth of the University as Open. Global research endeavors requiring data sharing free faculty to go beyond the walls of the institution. Healthcare may be moving faster than the rest of the university community by translational research efforts and health information exchange as facilitators.
10. American Global Competitiveness and Research and Education Networks (IT and its contribution to reducing the town-gown divide).
Another quote true for healthcare: “IT and network engineering, and a commitment to supporting evaluation and at the same time catalyzing innovation, attracting investment and supporting the value of quality of life.”
With all the hype about mobile and clouds, it is refreshing to have a more thoughtful analysis of what is ahead.
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Google Public Data Explorer for Healthcare
March 16, 2010
Google recently released its public data explorer which combines the Google visualization tools with public datasets include population data and health data. For healthcare, the initial launch includes Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the U.S. and Cancer cases in the U.S. The charts allow selection by state and time options. For these two charts, CDC data sources are used.
So could this data explorer be used more broadly with other health data sets. For starters, those at Data.gov (although most of the health data sets are Medicare cost data). But could major disease registries open themselves up to this API so that medical researchers could visualize more data sources and generate more research questions more quickly. This could be one solution for the for the lethal lag time. The CDC has additional data sets available. But what about opening closed data sets, such as, those from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons or other disease-specific registries. Then there is the growing volume of patient reported data from sites like PatientsLikeMe and CureTogether.
The limitation of this approach is having researchers capable of interpreting these data visualizations to make meaningful interpretations. The peer review process would prevent publication of misinterpretations of the data. An additional control would be combining the data explorer with social networking tools for users to discuss visualizations and research observations of the data. Perhaps this could be accomplished through Google Wave.
Comments and data sets welcome.
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Book Review: Googled-The End of the World as We Know It
February 27, 2010
I recently completed this book by Ken Auletta who promotes his unique access to the search engine giant. The books follow the history of Google from the earliest days of the founders at Stanford, to rocketing to fame, going public and then being labeled as the evil empire. More recently, he chronicles conflicts with the government, traditional media, traditional advertising, publishers and China. He leaves with Google at a crossroads of maturing founders which he suggests may be losing focus, competitors in social media, and ongoing challenges from Microsoft and others.
The book describes each new major app and the process and culture of building new tools and keeping them free. Only two pages are devoted to Google Health, however. Generally, the books focuses much more on the advertising business which has made lead to Google’s financial success sometimes overshadows description of apps and the engineering culture. Too many pages are devoted to the failing of traditional media and, of course, Google and the competition continue to evolve since the publication of the book.
The closing question in the book is: has Google become so big and entangled in conflict that it has lost its innovative edge? Recently the excitement over Google Wave and Buzz have met there match with Apple’s iPad. Yet the dominance of cloud computing and Google’s dominance in the cloud may continue to have more of a long term impact than the devices that connect to the cloud.
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Thinking about the Future
October 29, 2009
What will the Web Look Like in 5 years? Gartner presented Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google to talk about the future. Some of his key points include:
- Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.
- Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.
- Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.
He also talks about being trapped in a 1980s architecture. I heard a webinar demo of an app today which uses client-server technology. It seems to me that any application which does not use the web with AJAX and hosted on a virtual server is old technology and not something that should be supported.
Schmidt also talks about the Google business model and pricing. He notes that Google customers ask for more features for a price that is less that what they are paying for desktop applications. They are starting at the bottom with the largest customer for Google docs/email of 35,000 seats but 10s of thousands of companies (at $50 per seat).
“We are not trying to design the future, we are trying to invent it along the way.”
“We have migration tools and no one seems to migrate back.”
Is the implication that the majority of companies will move the cloud for desktop apps and enterprise apps? Are current vendor supported enterprise apps inflexible as he says. Are companies and health care missing out on mobile opportunities? Open source also adds to that flexibility.
Five years from now, will be all on powerful wireless devices, running open source, cloud-based apps, with books on netbook tablets and running a Wave-like instantaneously messaging. What will that mean for health care and especially collaboration in health care? How about collaboration so fast that medical treatment is communicated and executed faster than we can imagine either at home or at a local clinic thru virtual technology promoting health and treating symptoms to minimize side effects. Support of participatory medicine will be seamless through these mobile, real-time social networks.
Finally, thanks to Eric Schmidt for his humorous quips throughout. Check out the full 45 minutes also.
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Cloud Computing Tops Gartner’s list
August 26, 2009
Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies includes an evaluation of cloud computing. They view cloud computing as being at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. While companies look to the cloud for cost effective solutions, “The levels of hype around cloud computing in the IT industry are deafening, with every vendor expounding its cloud strategy…”
Another post on the Emerge Blog, sees cloud computing as a promise without hype noting three cloud based models:
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
- Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
This is a helpful formulation especially since so many platforms are becoming available in the Cloud and specifically in health care: Google Health and Healthvault to mention just two. While there is still concern about security in cloud computing limiting its adoption in health care, these three models should be considered when talking about private and hybrid clouds more common in the future of health care.
Also of note is the expansion of cloud offerings from Amazon. Adoption of Amazon Web Services faces some barriers: “The single biggest barrier to enterprise adoption that exists today is the
reluctance to live with one foot in each of two worlds, the on-premise IT
infrastructure and the world of the cloud. What Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
aims to do is bridge those two worlds.”
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Public and Private Clouds – Health Information Exchange (HIE)
August 13, 2009
In healthcare, there has been hesitancy to consider cloud computing in spite of the promise of funding for electronic medical records and perhaps HIE. The main issues in cloud computing and EMRs are security and availability. Security is governed by HIPAA including the upcoming regulations on data breaches. Security of EMRs and PHRs is also key in maintaining public trust in EMRs and by implication, medical practices. Availability is key as well as medical practices become dependent on real-time data from EMRs for medical decision making.
- Can the cloud provide the security and availability/reliabity for EMRs?
- Alternatively, are EMRs now becoming private clouds which can potentially interact with the public cloud, such as in the case of disease registries and public health initiatives?
- Are Health Information Exchanges at type of private cloud or would it be helpful to redefine them as such?
Several recent articles give some insight into this issue:
- The New Sentinel Network — Improving the Evidence of Medical-Product Safety – NEJM, 8/13
- Einstein, Sharks and Clouds: IT Security In The Cloud – .NET Developer’s Journal
- Cloud computing for the enterprise: Part 1: Capturing the cloud – IBM Developer Works
- 1 In 3 Developers Working On Private Cloud Apps- Information Week
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Web 2.0 Magazine
March 19, 2009
Came across a new online magazine and toolbox – the Web 2.0 Magazine. Lots of blog postings on a variety of topics but lacking dates. Its toolbox includes a small catalog of web 2.0 tools and hopefully will grow with tools and reviews. Industry events includes several related to cloud computing, such as Private Clouds.
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Building 100% in the Cloud
November 5, 2008
A new Web 2.0 company, Drop.io, has its infrastructure virtually through Amazon making it totally dependent on the Cloud for hosting. Are there pros and cons to this? They see mostly pros – highly available, meet unpredictable growth needs, limit startup expenses, treat storage like the commodity it is. They like the variable cost as a start up as opposed to fixed costs. Maybe there is a lesson for Health 2.0 startups here.
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The Intelligent Cloud – Implications for Health and Medicine
September 19, 2008
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
This phrase describes the future of cloud computing and more specifically, information storage and retrieval.
Predictions from Google:
- By 2019, parallel-processing computer clusters will be 50 to 100 times more powerful
- we’ll also see a rush of new devices customized to particular applications, and more environmental sensors and actuators, all sending and receiving data via the cloud.
- computer systems will have greater opportunity to learn from the collective behavior of billions of humans
- Researchers across medical and scientific fields can access massive data sets and run analysis and pattern detection algorithms that aren’t possible today.
There are likely other implications for health care, such as, accessing the the cloud (or a secure area of it) to see your medical records or X-rays anywhere and on any device (Google map of your body and DNA?), ability to get answers to complex medical problems from anywhere, intelligent prescriptions with a map to the closest pharmacy or dispensing station of the future. Other ideas? Need a cloud computing for medicine think tank.
