I recently spent an amazing two days at the Point Lookout Resort in Northport, Maine with a community of “disruptors”.
Athena Health’s second annual More Disruption Please Conference, an event aimed to accelerate disruptive innovations in health care, brought together more than 100 CEOs, entrepreneurs, Venture Capitalists, academics, and software engineers to discuss ways to drive the industry towards innovation, openness and collaboration.
Traditionally, the healthcare has been an industry driven from top down. After attending this conference, I realize this is going to change dramatically. Bringing innovative technologies into healthcare will change the way information is distributed and transferred. These technologies will enable doctors to spend more time with their patients and give them better care.  The less time the doctor has to spend on paper work and transferring information, the more time they will have for their patients.
Our world is ready for a disruptive innovation in healthcare.
From my conversations at the conference, it is clear that the first phase of this disruption is the use of smartphones and the process has already begun. I decided to test this by looking for diabetes apps on my phone and 20 came up! Can you imagine the global impact this will have? Technology is global and allows us to have access to people instantly–We can have a specialist in Iceland look at our chart in seconds. Just think about the billions of users this can benefit?
While we are already seeing disruptive innovations working, I believe a dramatic difference will be seen within the next five years. In underdeveloped areas we are seeing a huge difference as they are coming from a clean sheet of paper.
CloudPrime is a disruptive innovation. We supply the secure messaging that medical applications can interface to. Cloud computing in general will have a huge impact in healthcare. Costs of healthcare will be reduced, we will have greater access to industry specialists across the globe, and we will have easier communication. The percentage of smartphones is rapidly increasing which will enable this change.
This is not just hype, it is reality. Once the applications are in place, we will all see a disruption in healthcare and many other industries, for that matter.

-Bob Miller

It’s an exciting time here at CloudPrime, as we have been hard at work on something that we are eager to share with you very soon. The thing we are introducing will address many of the problems our clients are seeing with secure document delivery, and issues that professionals across all industries deal with to ensure that the information they send and receive is provided safely and privately. Think about those times when you need a file to be sent privately and with the highest level of security, what do you do?

While we are keeping under wraps what this “thing” is specifically for now, we’ve developed a little game that we like to call CloudPrime Clue. Over the past few weeks we have been sending out “CloudPrime Clues” on our and pages leading up to the announcement our team has. At the beginning of each week we release a new clue theme and additional information about the clue is provided throughout the week. Each CloudPrime Clue theme addresses a new topic of concern in the cloud that our new product will be the answer to!

So far, we’ve clued you into issues surrounding file size, going green, encryption, privacy, and mobile computing. Can you piece all the information together and figure out what our new product is? Below are some samples of tweets from the past few weeks:

Stay tuned and be sure to play along on Facebook and follow our hashtag, , on Twitter, to get the remaining clues before the big announcement!

-Mari Tangredi

 

In the spirit of David Letterman’s top 10 lists here are our takeaways from the San Francisco iHT2 event this past week.  http://ihealthtran.com/sanfranciscohome.html

1. IHPs (large integrated health providers, like university systems, etc), are by and large going with EPIC for EHR solutions, thereby automatically forgoing a degree of flexibility and any chance of real near-term interoperability.

2. The historical problems of security, reliability, and control with Cloud-based solutions are being rapidly overcome, and the cost savings from hosting data and applications in the Cloud are becoming so compelling that increasingly complex medical organizations and systems will require the Cloud in order to be effective and efficient…..or risk becoming extinct.

3. The HealthCare system, as usual, is the last great industrial complex to accept collaboration and efficiencies based on advances in information technology.

4. There has been a dramatic shift in the last two years toward the use of mobile and portable devices in all aspects of care, and this will only increase.

5. Nobody can really define the phrase  ”HIPAA compliance,” it is best approached and understood as a process, it is not just about security.

6. 30% of the vendors sponsoring were cloud-oriented.

7. Edge, last-mile connectivity in a HIPAA compliant fashion was a common pain point from small patient practices to large integrated health providers.

8. Cloud-based or service platforms having the ability to be more nimble and in turn handle the growing complexity of connectivity, interfacing, and interoperability are available and should be considered.

9. The cloud mitigates the need for traditional software upgrades and release cycles.

10. CIO’s and CMIO’s are opting to outsource for best-of-breed services and applications.  Driven by skilled resources in healthcare IT becoming increasingly scarce and more robust SaaS/cloud-based options being available.

I have had the unfortunate experience of having my wife of over 30 years pass away recently from pancreatic cancer. She lived for 18 months from her initial diagnosis. Prior to that she had been a very healthy 62 year old.  During the course of her illness, she was treated in five different hospitals, was under the care of over 40 physicians, and had numerous surgical and diagnostic procedures. One might say,  ”Well, this was certainly an edge case.” But hasn’t experience shown that it is the edge cases that bring out the flaws in the system? While I participated in her long and painful journey I came to realize that in spite of all the assertions made about information exchange and interoperability in healthcare, they are almost nonexistent once you go outside the four walls of a hospital.

The fact is, unless the patient or their family takes responsibility for the information that different hospitals and doctors will require when they come on board, they will have no reasonable way to have access to that data. During my wife’s illness, on numerous occasions, I had to hand carry DVDs, CDs,  or memory sticks so that other physicians could see the results of CT scans and radiology reports. I had to manually maintain a spreadsheet of her medications since there was no centralized system that was kept up to date, even where she was being treated. Obviously, the more manual recording the greater the chance for error, not to mention lost time.

I am writing this blog as a call to action. While many are wringing their hands over healthcare costs, in my opinion IT Vendors and Hospital Administrators are doing a great disservice to patients and medical personnel by not forcing their vendors to make it a high priority to improve interoperability and information exchange. As we all know, there are a number of high level committees and organizations that are working on this problem. However their progress is slow and the need is now.

Many of them have not even thought through how the Cloud can be a game changer.

The reality is that if Apple can provide iCloud so that users can upload all their content of different types to a single user ID and then deliver it to multiple devices, it is not so far fetched that the same capability could be applied to patient records. Patients typically have single identifiers. The notion that information stored in the Cloud is neither secure nor easily accessible has been proven to be a myth. View this video link from a researcher at Johns Hopkins.

http://www.dreamsimplicity.com/community/saas-video/communityteam/video/1277-cloud-computing-in-medicine?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

In addition, there are companies who provide low cost HIPAA compliant secure messaging solutions that can be implemented in minutes that will securely transfer data to and from the Cloud as well as between applications hosted in the Cloud.

It is my belief that if as much attention and investment is focused on medical information exchange as has been placed on making billing systems interoperable, we will have not only improved patient care  but a more efficient use of our medical resources as well.

When did lawyers become technologists?

The current cloud computing debate centers on whether the Public Cloud can be trusted.  Can IT infrastructure start with a private cloud and migrate later?  The private cloud advocates cite concerns such as security, control and adherence to compliance requirements as their primary reasons for not utilizing the public cloud. Clearly, cloud security is in question. But who should make the decision within your organization?

I was amazed to have an attendee at a major industry conference tell me: “his lawyers would never let him use the public cloud”.  My question was –“when did lawyers become technologists?”

Cloud Paradigm Shift

It is universally recognized that there is a major paradigm shift occurring driven by the new usage based pricing model of Cloud Computing.  Just 5 years ago SaaS was perceived as not being financially viable.  Indeed, the Public Cloud has become one of the primary approaches to utilizing mission critical applications.

CIOs around the world are now including Cloud Computing in their future planning. They are trying to determine which Cloud environments should be adopted that make the most sense for their infrastructure requirements. Leading CIOs are allocating resources to determine the most cost effective and scalable cloud investments.

Cloud Phobias and Facts

The fact is that a lot of the fears regarding public clouds are coming from those who do not understand technology.  It’s important to know the facts.

The largest companies in the industry are investing billions of dollars in creating cloud platforms that include state of the art hardware, networking and security. These companies include IBM, Microsoft, HP, Rackspace and Amazon.

The private clouds cannot possibly invest enough money to remain competitive with the capabilities and security that are available in public clouds. In addition as a result of economies of scale, public clouds are the leaders in establishing and implementing compliance standards.

This is also an industry where it’s really all about the applications and solutions. There will be a far more extensive SaaS application catalogue available for the public cloud than for a portfolio of private clouds all of which have implemented their own custom stack.

Let’s face it,  application developers have always followed the money…

A couple of weeks ago, we were given the opportunity to present CloudPrime at the IBM Impact Cloud Zone in Las Vegas. It was a great week, filled with a lot of interesting conversations.

We want to send a big thank you to Ann Saydah at IBM and her team for organizing the event and giving us the chance to showcase CloudPrime’s business messaging service in the Cloud Zone. Along with exhibiting in the Cloud Zone, we were given the opportunity to talk about how CloudPrime is transforming business messaging during the Rapid Fire session. (If we get a chance to share the video of our 4-minutes of fame, we will post it here on our blog.)

It was also exciting for CloudPrime to officially announce it’s multi-year partnership at the conference that enables MQ customers to extend their messaging footprint. We are looking forward to working with IBM and it goes without saying this is a really exciting time at CloudPrime!

Our customers need resilient, secure and easy-to-deploy application  messaging solutions that meet their changing demands. As more and more buzz around the cloud, application migration, security and compliance percolate to the surface, CloudPrime has peaked the interest of more and more CIOs and Infrastructure Managers.

Transform: CloudPrime enables enterprises of all sizes and industries to transform how they connect applications. Our cloud-based infrastructure provides scalability, embedded security, resliency and economies of scale. Because of the Cloud, our customers can rely on a service based messaging infrastructure, allowing managers to focus on mission critical tasks instead of deploying and managing costly VPNs and hardware.

Manage and Serve: As a service, CloudPrime provides a robust network that guarantees the delivery of every message as well as providing “military grade” security and encryption.

Build: With CloudPrime you can build application interfaces in minutes regardless of the application or transport protocol.

Consume: CloudPrime’s application messaging services are easy to consume and do not require any hardware installation or IT training.

To learn more about CloudPrime and the advantages of our Cloud-based application messaging service, visit https://cloudprime.net/cloudprime-about.php