From the January/February 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Marilyn Solano, sales and marketing director for RamSoft, seller of PACS, RIS and teleradiology solutions, says cloud-based solutions account for approximately 30 percent of her company’s sales. She has noticed they are becoming more accepted by the health care community. She’s not alone in her observations.

“We see greater adoption or virtualization and private cloud platforming, rather than a mass adoption of the more public type of models,” says Jeanine Banks, general manager of global product marketing for GE Healthcare.


There are significant differences between public and private cloud-based storage. While public cloud models will be less expensive and maintained by an outside source, there can be problems with security and accountability as well as flexibility of utilization and data access. Still, for smaller facilities with limited budgets, public options can prove to be attractive options.

Banks feels that one of the selling factors of the cloud is the pay-as-you-go model. “I think the attraction to cloud has been around the metered use of a service that really can grow as you need it to, to adapt to your business needs, or you can minimize use, which will result in minimized cost,” she says. Another benefit of the cloud, according to Banks, is that facilities don’t have to worry about the back end of the system; they can just stay focused on the clinical side of their day-to-day tasks.

“One of the big costs for medical imaging is staffing an IT department,” says Tom Gibbings, associate product manager for Unity RIS with DR Systems, a vendor of RIS, PACS, CVIS and cloud image sharing solutions. “When you put a solution in a cloud, you eliminate a lot of your IT staffing needs, which will then in turn really lower your cost of production.”

But despite these noteworthy benefits, there is still some room for improvement when it comes to the cloud’s security and performance. Since cloud solutions are web-based, some potential users are concerned that speed of access and safety levels may not be as high as they would be with a traditional PACS directly installed in a medical facility.

Although demand for cloud-based solutions seems to be on the rise, many in the industry are still unsure whether they will completely replace traditional PACS in the future.

“It depends on the business,” says DR System’s Gibbings. “When you have the big hospital that goes and buys the little imaging centers, that big hospital has a pretty sophisticated IT department, and so they don’t necessarily want to give up control of that because they have their own security concerns, the HIPAA security concerns and high-availability concerns. When they control that data center, they can architect it to a way that makes them comfortable. When you put it in the cloud, you essentially do not want to deal with it. We’re finding that the small- and medium-sized imaging centers just want to take a hands-off approach and let the vendor worry about it.”

January/February 2012 Magazine

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