Healthcare has finally abandoned fear of the cloud and now realizes the value of cloud computing.

"People are actually embracing [the cloud] in healthcare," said Ed McCallister, senior vice president and CIO at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). "Now is the time [for cloud computing]. ... I've been in healthcare pretty much my entire career, and this is absolutely the most transformative time."

AI in healthcare goes beyond IBM Watson. In this e-guide, discover 4 uses for AI in healthcare particularly how it can help improve patient engagement and whether we can overcome security and interoperability concerns surrounding the technology.

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In the past, health IT professionals worried about the security of the cloud, but over the years, the stability of major cloud platforms has eased those concerns. Instead, healthcare organizations see the value of cloud computing choices, such as how cost-effective the cloud is and its role in value-based care, population health and patient engagement.

Of the three well-known cloud computing options -- public, private and hybrid (see "Three different cloud options") -- hybrid cloud has gained favor among some hospital CIOs.

"A lot of us ... use a hybrid approach," said Karen Clark, CIO at OrthoTennessee in Knoxville, Tenn. Along with Clark and McCallister, Indranil Ganguly, vice president and CIO at JFK Health System, and Deanna Wise, CIO and executive vice president at Dignity Health, are using a hybrid approach with the cloud.

Now is the time [for cloud computing]. ... I've been in healthcare pretty much my entire career, and this is absolutely the most transformative time. Ed McCallisterCIO, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center

UPMC is among those facilities that favor a hybrid approach. It takes applications already used within the organization that have a competitive advantage -- such as storage -- and moves them into the cloud, leaving everything else on-premises. "That's probably the most prominent approach that people would take," McCallister said.

Ganguly and JFK Health take a similar approach. Many of the applications used by JFK Health, based in Edison, N.J., also reside on a hybrid cloud setup, Ganguly said. The facility uses "a vendor partner [cloud platform], and multiple customers [are] hosted on it, but it's not our infrastructure," he explained. "We don't even set it up or own it. It's not a private cloud, but it is a restricted cloud, and so that's what we use right now for a lot of our applications. It's a software-as-a-service type [of] model, and the software is housed at the vendor side, and we're accessing it remotely."

McCallister said the hybrid cloud model is popular in healthcare right now because the cloud still represents a bit of the unknown. The hybrid cloud acts as a testbed for certain things in healthcare, he noted, adding, "Some of it is kind of toe in the water -- not knowing the cloud as well as they know the traditional environment."

Additionally, the hybrid cloud can take the pressure off IT staff, Ganguly said: "I don't have to have people focused on [hybrid], and it allows our team to focus more on the application itself and making sure the application is set up well for our users."

For many CIOs, the value of cloud computing includes cost-effectiveness, scalability and easier access to data. The cloud also offers opportunities for improved storage, big data analytics, population health, patient engagement and value-based care.

Access to data and population health. At UPMC, the cloud has outdistanced legacy systems in terms of data access, McCallister said. "The cloud allows us to ... lift the data from those many different sources that we have and actually allow access to that data in a way that's not possible when you think about the legacy systems," he said. For example, the cloud allows patients or physicians to access any data living in the cloud wherever and whenever they need it. When it comes to legacy systems, certain computers and devices need to be networked to a physical server, and access outside this network is difficult.

If you want to engage patients, you have to go where the patients are ... on [their mobile] phone. Karen ClarkCIO, OrthoTennessee

At this point, McCallister added, the value of legacy systems lies in the data they hold from both the payer and provider sides. "It's a very rich data source to get," he said.

However, the value of cloud computing can be realized here because the cloud allows easier access to all of this data. And greater access can be applied to and help with population health efforts, which refers to a movement in healthcare to analyze care data across a group of individuals and improve wellness. "If I know about you through your payer activity, through your clinical activity, through the provider activities and we can have that in a cloud with tools that reside in the cloud that are accessible to the consumer, that's where the cloud actually enables a better strategy," McCallister said.

Patient engagement and value-based care. Meanwhile, the cloud is critical to greater patient engagement, OrthoTennessee's Clark said. "If you want to engage with patients, you can't say, 'Well, why don't you drive to our office and complete this survey,' right?" she said. "If you want to engage patients, you have to go where the patients are. And where the patients are is on [their mobile] phone. So for patient engagement, that would be a cloud-necessary area."

Furthermore, "value-based care always requires patient engagement," Clark said. Value-based care is a national trend being pushed by federal regulators in which providers are no longer paid for the quantity of services they provide, but rather for the quality of patient health outcomes.

OrthoTennessee, which runs several area orthopedic clinics, is already pursuing value-based care with a patient-reported outcomes tool, Clark noted. Before surgeries, she explained, the organization surveys patients via a mobile device to see, for example, how they're doing, how bad their pain is, where the pain is and whether they're able to walk up stairs. After a surgery is completed, the organization uses this tool to continue monitoring the patient.

Big data and storage. One issue that many discuss in healthcare is dealing with the flood of data that comes from initiatives like population health and technology trends like the internet of things. "We can't do big data in the traditional way that we did with data centers," McCallister said. "You can't do traditional data center and storage strategies when you have something like genomics at the doorstep." Genomics is the science of sequencing the human genome, and there's a lot of data behind that activity -- petabytes of information each year.

"When you think about how much data we're collecting, it's enormous," said Wise of Dignity Health, which is headquarted in San Francisco. "And it's only going to get bigger with [genomics] and everything else we're doing. You need a place that you can increase that size as fast as you need to without feeling like you've got to wait until the next budget cycle."

The cloud offers such scalability. McCallister predicted that in the future, there will be very few data center companies. Instead, today's big cloud storage players that have the ability to expand "the way that we need them to expand in healthcare" will become the new norm, he said.

While many healthcare organizations use routine applications hosted in the cloud, some CIOs are now moving critical apps over to the cloud, including their electronic health records (EHRs).

Ganguly said JFK Health is currently moving its core EHR system over to a cloud platform. "So it's all going to be hosted in [the vendor's] data center, and then we're accessing from our site over the web, over the cloud," he explained.

Cost is the main reason for the move. "If I was to build the whole infrastructure in-house, there's a significant cost, and I have to refresh that cost every three, four, five years maximum," Ganguly said. "Whereas now, if it's on [the vendor's] infrastructure, they're responsible for keeping everything maintained [and] upgraded. They're refreshing the servers as needed, and it's invisible to us."

Managing and maintaining EHRs in-house, "I'd spend a couple million dollars upfront, and I'd leverage that investment over five years," he said. "Here, what I'm doing is I'm paying this contract-type model, and it's a uniform cost throughout."

Ganguly said that some IT pros will argue that this approach ultimately will break even. Others will say because of the ability to negotiate due to economies of scale, the price point is actually much better and there's the added benefit of not having to manage it.

Meanwhile, UPMC decided to go with a colocation model and partnered with a tier-three data center company, McCallister reported. "We had some aging data centers, and probably five years ago we would've built a new data center," he said. "By the time we move into the new data center, we will have retired probably close to a thousand servers in our existing data centers because of our move to the cloud."

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CIOs embrace the value of cloud computing in healthcare - TechTarget

(Bloomberg) -- Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos sold about $1 billion in company stock as part of a planned divestiture, a month after the worlds third-richest man said he spends about that amount annually on his space exploration company Blue Origin LLC.

Bezos sold 1 million shares from Tuesday to Thursday ranging in price from about $935 to $950 per share, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday.

He still owns 79.9 million shares, or about 17 percent of the company, down from 83 million shares at the end of 2015.

Amazons growing e-commerce business and profitable cloud-computing division has propelled its founding CEO up the ranks of the worlds wealthiest people, where he is now No. 3 behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Spanish entrepreneur Amancio Ortega Gaona, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Bezos has been selling Amazon stock to invest in Blue Origin, which aims to send tourists on brief flights into suborbital space where they can experience weightlessness and get a nice view of the Earth.

His competitors in space tourism include Elon Musks Space Exploration Technologies Corp., which hopes to send tourists around the moon next year, and Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic.

Read more here:
Amazon CEO Bezos Sells About $1 Billion in Company Stock - MSPmentor

Mumbai: Known for its Photoshop and Illustrator software packages used primarily by design professionals, Adobe Systems Inc. is now betting big on providing creative and marketing professionals solutions that reside in the cloud.

Cloud computing typically allows companies to use software as a service (SaaS) rather than pay for it upfront.

Adobes solutions broadly cover three areasthe Document Cloud (to help create and manage documents), Creative Cloud (for designing purposes) and Experience Cloud (to monitor and analyse customer behaviour).

We couldnt have been more pleased with what we have done with (our) Creative Cloud, Shantanu Narayen, chairman, president and CEO, Adobe told a media gathering in Mumbai on Wednesday.

Narayen insisted that there is a massive tailwind of digital globally, and consumer expectations have risen dramatically. The next generation of software will be consumer-in, he said, implying that companies need to sharpen their focus on customer satisfaction in todays digital world.

The companys senior executives are also bullish about Adobes prospects in India. In India, we are just starting to ride the (customer) experience wave, said Kulmeet Bawa, Adobes managing director for South Asia. He added that there is a lot of headroom for growth for Adobe in India, which employs about 5,200 people in the country30% of the global headcount.

In this context, Narayen also underscored Adobes reliance on partnerships.

Citing the example of the companys long-term partnership with Microsoft Corp., he said, While we currently have our Experience Cloud running on Microsofts Azure platform, the vision, going forward, is to have all our clouds on Azure.

ALSO READ: Despite Trumps protectionism, India to remain Adobes innovation hub

Speaking about trends, Narayen pointed out that chief marketing officers (CMOs) and chief digital officers (CDOs) and other C-suite executives are increasingly asking how they can also figure out digital transformation for their organizations.

Analysts concur that as customers become central to how enterprises transform themselves digitally, CMOs and CDOs are having more say in how advertising campaigns are devised and runand how the tech tools needed to create, run, manage and analyse those campaigns are bought and implemented.

Research firm Gartner Inc. noted in its CMO Spend Survey 2016-17 that CMOs now oversee or heavily influence customer experience, technology spending, and profit and loss performance as means to deliver growth. A report from research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), too, forecasts that spending on marketing technology will increase from $20.2 billion in 2014 to $32.4 billion in 2018.

Gartner uses the term digital marketing hub that can be likened to the so-called marketing clouds that consolidate and simplify the use of multiple marketing technology tools.

In its February 2017 report, Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, Gartner lists 22 companies. Adobe, Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. dominate this market, according to the report.

There are a few challenges, though, in expanding this market, analysts say. For instance, Sujit Janardanan, vice-president of marketing at Aranca, a global research and advisory firm, believes that many of the tools that are part of the marketing clouds do not work smoothly.

There are integration and skills-availability issues, he said. Whats more, he added, is that the cloud offerings from large companies such as Adobe and Oracle are super-expensive, costing many times more than what smaller providers such as HubSpot Inc. would charge.

First Published: Thu, May 04 2017. 02 11 AM IST

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Adobe bets big on cloud computing for marketing, creative professionals - Livemint

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May 2017, Vol. 5, No. 3

In healthcare, some illnesses can be cured quickly; some can't. But before applying a proper antidote, several factors need to be considered about the patient in question. The same can be said when hospital CIOs and IT pros work to formulate a strategy for moving their computing processes to the cloud, sometimes by choice and sometimes out of necessity. Critical issues need to be weighed, such as security of patient records, the cost to vacate the premises, how much information really needs to be stored in the cloud and actual savings to hospitals as a result of the move.

Our cover story examines these issues through the eyes of hospital CIOs, who see healthcare cloud computing delivering noticeable improvements in security, patient care and cost savings. They're learning to embrace the benefits of moving in part or whole to the cloud as they choose from among the various private, public and hybrid options.

In another feature, we look at the prevalence of mobile devices throughout the hospital community. They can cause migraines for CIOs and IT departments trying to maintain security with healthcare cloud computing safeguards. That's not to mention the inherent resistance IT departments can encounter from doctors, nurses and other hospital staff who share patient healthcare information over their personal smartphones and tablets.

Also in this issue, we look at some steps hospitals will need to take, including revamping IT teams, to gain full advantage of the cloud's benefits. Sometimes baby steps can go a lot farther than giant steps.

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Hospital CIOs see benefits of healthcare cloud computing - TechTarget