Conversations regarding modernizing health IT inevitably lead to what role the various flavors of cloud will play, and how best to utilize these technologies within Healthcare institutions.
Integrating cloud technology is therefore one of the main items atop the IT agenda. When approaching cloud integration, institutions inevitably face complex questions around security, availability, efficiency, and resiliency that represent barriers and risk to adoption.
During Becker's Hospital Review's 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting, in a session sponsored by VMware, Cameron Lewellen, Director of ISV strategy for healthcare at VMware, led an executive roundtable exploring the benefits of — and barriers to — embarking on the cloud transformation journey.
Four key takeaways were:
- Cloud implementations have helped companies hit their goals and have assuaged fears. Organizations have a myriad of reasons for adopting cloud technology with the leading reasons being: replacing "ancient" data centers, procuring a backup option for an existing cloud solution with slow response times, enabling decentralization and remote work and alleviating recruiting challenges among them.
Some roundtable participants acknowledged that they were initially skeptical about whether data stored in the cloud would be readily available or whether they would get adequate and timely support when needed, but that those fears were quickly eliminated by experienced partners that understood the realities of multi-cloud. - Diverse criteria exist for migrating solutions and workloads to the cloud. When evaluating whether a particular workload should be moved to the cloud or stay on premise, organizations are considering criteria such as elasticity (i.e., the ability to expand or shrink capacity to adapt to workload changes), egress charges, a preference for owning versus managing risk, disaster recovery capabilities, resource staffing, availability of applications within the current technology vendor the organization may be using and, ultimately, vendor relationships.
"A lot of the decision-making has to do with establishing relationships with vendors. We already know which vendors are strong partners versus which are just vendors," the chief technology officer of an academic medical center in the Northeast said. - Barriers to integration include staff buy-in and cybersecurity concerns. When integrating cloud technology with on-premise solutions and workloads, IT leaders and internal champions often come against staff resistance, some of which is generational and some due to institutional risk aversion. Cybersecurity concerns are also front and center, especially as organizations continue to maintain a relentless security focus on on-premise technology (which is considered safer than the cloud).
Other challenges include achieving synergy among vendor-scheduled upgrades across the different cloud vendors an organization may have partnered with, as well as the fact that it is generally more difficult to get data out of the cloud, when needed, than it is to migrate it in. - To stay safe, organizations are arming employees with education and cautionary tales. To ward off ransomware attacks, several attendees said their organizations are investing in user education — both for employees and patients — about phishing attacks and the importance of password hygiene, multifactor authentication and ensuring correct access management.
One participant noted that to sensitize clinicians to cybersecurity risks, her institution provides examples of real-world incidents that have taken place in neighboring hospitals or health systems and how those incidents have impacted patient care. Another attendee added that to encourage good cybersecurity behavior, her organization awards certificates to employees who correctly identify a fraudulent email.
While confidence in the cloud has increased in recent years and examples of the positive impact of cloud adoption are beginning to emerge, security remains a concern. To safely navigate high-quality cloud transformation, it is paramount that healthcare organizations choose a trustworthy vendor who is a true partner, not merely a technology supplier.