From the June 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


The bigger concern he believes, is that existing IT teams already have too much on their plate. “They currently need to spend their time fighting to keep on-premise systems up, and they don't have the bandwidth to be strategic or to innovate for patients or clinicians,” he says.

That overburdening of the IT team could lead to increased downtime of on-site information systems, employee burnout, or at least the removal of the IT team from strategy meetings, which decrease a hospital’s ability to create innovative solutions and a better environment for patient care.


Getting hospital data onto a cloud system can free up significant time for the IT team. It takes away much of the system hardware maintenance they’re grappling with — at least at the enterprise level. On the individual level, there will still, of course, be work after someone types in the wrong password to their laptop too many times, or has issues installing an update, but problems at that level don’t bring everything to a grinding halt.

Sivakumar does caution that hospitals should keep a few things in mind with a cloud move. While reliability should typically be improved with a move to the cloud, due to dedicated staff and intentional redundancy, an internet connection helps connect to the magic. Or as he explains, “if a hospital does not have a reliable high-speed internet connection, moving to the cloud may require a local setup for periods of downtime,”

Sketchy internet connections could come into play during high level disasters, natural or manmade, where communications infrastructure is compromised. It’s not even a question of disasters for some facilities however. Some rural hospitals simply lack reliable high-speed internet connections. “In areas where hospitals have reliable internet, accessibility should be equal to or better than an on-premise system,” says Sivakumar.

With the proper infrastructure in place, hospitals can tap into an entire menu of improved workflow solutions. Hospitals committing to their IT efforts can lean on telemedicine options, patient portals for scheduling, billing, checking labs and medications; and they can also engage with the community through education and information opportunities.

The companies who are just beginning to explore the healthcare space will continue to be the question mark. How quickly will they be able to either sort through the confusing tangle of patchwork fixes that has been healthcare’s IT structure? Or how quickly will they be able to get hospitals on board with a better system of organization?

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