Cloud Computing

With the widespread digitization of patient health records, traditional paper and film-based records have been replaced with Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Whether your organization is a large clinical practice with multiple locations, or a single facility hospital or an accountable care organization, EHR solutions can help you streamline workflows and improve your ability to care for patients. Vendors such as Epic and MEDITECH offer complete software solutions that help patients’ records follow them from the physician’s office, to the hospital, and to all of the other places where they receive care. Through the use of desktop and application virtualization, access to patient information is simplified from various devices. But to make the most of today’s innovative EHR offerings, IT teams often resort to piecing together custom infrastructure solutions using separate servers and storage to deal with the need for improved application performance, coupled with the increased complexity and large volumes of information that must be stored and managed. Unfortunately this siloed approach is sub optimal, very complex and time consuming. Web-scale foundation enables better choices Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is the ideal infrastructure solution to address EHR requirements as it improves care provider productivity and significantly decreases risks with one-click operations, non-disruptive life cycle management, while providing patient privacy and data security. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud provides a dependable platform whereby clinicians and IT staff can focus on care delivery instead of day-to-day operations. The Nutanix solution is based on Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), where Nutanix software consolidates servers, networking, enterprise block and file storage, and virtualization into an unified platform, all of which is managed through a single interface, called Prism. Nutanix provides rich management for data protection, automation, networking, and security services. The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform enables you to virtualize your EHR environment using your choice of hypervisor (Nutanix AHV, VMware vSphere, Microsoft HyperV) while taking 80% less space versus traditional architectures.  Scaling is simple with Nutanix, enabling you to go from pilot to production and beyond without re-architecting or incurring any downtime. Healthcare organizations get a standardized, repeatable, and cost-effective solution for EHR application VMs deployments with predictable performance and scalability. Secure patient access and data security Nutanix was engineered with a secure-first approach to provide end-to-end intrinsic security measures without requiring the deployment be re-architected as nodes are added. The platform stays secure and compliant while meeting the highest government regulations. Nutanix security automation is always-on and will bring baseline configurations back into check without any additional work from IT admins, closing those security holes, and making compliance audits a breeze. The HIPAA capable infrastructure, with features such as two-factor authentication, is instrumental in providing secure EHR patient access. Choose simplicity The Nutanix web-scale architecture goes well beyond hyperconvergence by offering you the ability to start small and simply scale to tens and hundreds of nodes, while giving you a simple and efficient way to manage your entire environment. With Nutanix Prism, you get one intuitive console to manage all of your servers and storage, with actionable stats at your fingertips, cutting the time spent managing your infrastructure by 50% or more. Prism Central extends this capability, allowing you to manage your entire infrastructure for EHR across multiple sites from one centralized location. By giving you access to detailed and correlated information for all VMs, compute, and storage, Prism simplifies and speeds troubleshooting, enabling you to locate bottlenecks in minutes, versus hours or even days with traditional server and storage solutions. To find out more about Nutanix’s solutions, visit Table Top 02 at the HIMSS Australia Digital Health Summit on November 21.

While Google apparently signed a business associate agreement with Ascension, and the scope of the data sharing appears to be in line with HIPAA allowances, there are still many questions about how the patient information is being put to use.

The software integration will help streamline back-end processing and enable more Simply Helping's more than 1,000 staff members better support their clients from the field, officials say.

Teva Pharmaceuticals' new ProAir Digihaler detects when the inhaler is used and measures inspiratory flow, giving the patient and provider valuable insight, says EVP Sven Dethlefs.

The cloud-based EHR developer had alleged that a former customer, ZenCharts, which plans to appeal, had violated a user agreement, cloning its software to develop a system of its own.

In most industries, change or evolution isn’t a gradual process. You might have years and years of equilibrium, with little improvements here and there, and then all of a sudden a massive technology and/or business model change takes us to a new level. For example, the taxis of 1950 looked a lot like the taxis of 2010. Then along came ride-sharing apps. Now, as we look forward to self-driving cars, I would say that the “rent-a-ride” market is in the middle of an explosion of rapid change – how it will end, we don’t know. Looking at how technology has changed the healthcare industry, I would argue that we have already had one explosion of rapid change, and we are in the middle of a second one now.  When my career started, we wrote billing systems – systems with structured data, typed in on numeric keypads, by dedicated users of the computer. This was the first generation of success in health IT, and it digitised the administrative parts of healthcare. Then a number of technology breakthroughs happened – standardising on SQL databases, the storage and viewing of text and images, and perhaps most importantly, the graphical user interface. This allowed non-dedicated users, like physicians, nurses and patients, to use software to help them with their work and lives. This ushered in the next couple of decades where we built and deployed electronic medical records (EMRs). Now health IT is in the middle of a second explosion of rapid change. This disruption to healthcare offers the promise of even bigger benefits – with improved outcomes and reduced costs – than we have seen with digitisation to date. If you look at the disruptive technologies of today: cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), wearables, imaging/text analytics, advanced interoperability and ubiquitous user experience (UX), we have the raw ingredients for this next massive change. And if you examine that list, not one of those technologies has reached its full potential yet. They are all showing promise, but most importantly, they are incredibly promising as we explore the various use cases where they can help. The history of InterSystems has mirrored this trajectory. Our initial database technology enabled the major billing systems of the original health IT market. A couple of decades ago, we launched our Caché product line and enabled the major EMRs in the market today, including Epic, and our own EMR TrakCare. Last year, in line with this current explosion of rapid change, we launched our next platform, InterSystems IRIS for Health, to bring capabilities for this current explosion of rapid change – cloud, AI, API interoperability, analytics – to our customers. And some of our customers are already embracing these capabilities to change the way they support the healthcare industry. Earlier this year, MediWay Technology, one of the largest healthcare software companies in China, deployed its new iMedical Cloud healthcare IT ecosystem platform using IRIS for Health. This allows MediWay’s iMedical healthcare information system (HIS) to support all stakeholders in the Chinese healthcare system – including government, healthcare organisations, and consumers – in an environment where medical reform policies are driving increased collaboration, information sharing and use of big data. Two iMedical Cloud applications, hosted on Tencent Cloud, were launched – transactional cloud collaboration (Cloud HIS) and data cloud collaboration (HealthChain). These can be used within a region for real-time healthcare information exchange, centralised management control and unified allocation of resources. Built and deployed on a unified data platform, iMedical Cloud supports the vastly increased data volumes required with features like sharding. This distributes data across a number of cloud-based servers to provide flexible, inexpensive performance scaling. On the other side of the world in New York, HBI Solutions is using machine learning and predictive analytics to convert vast amounts of data into knowledge that can be applied in real time to decision support. Healthcare providers see not only their patients’ pasts, but also their likely futures. HBI’s Spotlight Data Solution identifies elements, or “features”, in health records that could indicate future problems.  What’s exciting about being in the middle of a period of rapid change is you don’t know how it will turn out. What is quite clear, based on the enabling technologies of this era, is that we are moving closer and closer to the patient, and closer and closer to being helpful to the clinicians and not just an administrative sidekick. Health IT has had a long and illustrious history digitising healthcare. But now we are about to create an even better future. I can’t wait to see what we build together. Are you looking for someone who you can talk to about your own rapid changes? Take the next step here.  About the Author As Vice President, InterSystems HealthShare, Don Woodlock oversees a family of products created to empower the transformation of health and care through comprehensive, shared health information. In his role, Woodlock is responsible for advancing the HealthShare vision to meet the challenges associated with delivering improved quality, accessibility and efficiency across the health and care industries.

The Mayo Clinic's new 10-year partnership with Google Cloud aims to look for the next breakthroughs that diagnose and treat complex and serious illness or conditions more effectively, says CIO Cris Ross.

A new report from EY shows how health systems need to embrace AI, social, mobile, analytics, cloud and sensor technologies to unlock the potential of their data.

The ACI platform, which the companies say can ease administrative burden by streamlining documentation, has been rolled out to some customers in beta and is planned to launch in early 2020 across several specialties.

For its most recent big healthcare hire, Google has recruited former National Coordinator for Health IT Dr. Karen DeSalvo to serve as its first chief health officer. WHY IT MATTERS The move, first reported by CNBC, is further evidence, as if more were needed, that the Mountain View, California-based technology titan is serious about its ambitions to disrupt the healthcare market. Earlier this month, Google parent company Alphabet hired former FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf – who, like DeSalvo, served during the Obama administration – to be the new head of strategy and policy for Verily Life Sciences and Google Health. And about this time last year, Google tapped Dr. David Feinberg, who had served as CEO of world-class health system Geisinger, to help it develop and expand its healthcare strategy, organizing the various initiatives of Alphabet companies such as Verily, DeepMind and Google Cloud. DeSalvo will report to Feinberg and will be tasked, among other things, with offering advice and perspective about clinician experience, according to CNBC. THE LARGER TREND DeSalvo served as National Coordinator for Health Information Technology from 2014 to 2016 and U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health from 2014 to 2017. During her two-and-a-half year stint as ONC chief, she led a series of successful projects related to EHR certification for the meaningful use program, interoperability advancements, patient access initiatives and more. Since her time in the federal government, DeSalvo has kept her CV well-updated with a series of high-profile jobs. In late 2017, she joined the faculty at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin, with professorships in both the Department of Internal Medicine and in the Department of Population Health. In March 2018, she was elected president of the Society of General Internal Medicine. She also joined Leavitt Partners, the consulting firm founded by former HHS Secretary Michael Leavitt, as a senior advisor. A longtime leader in public policy, population health, social determinants and patient engagement, DeSalvo was commissioner of health for the city of New Orleans – where she helped to digitize the city's health IT infrastructure after Hurricane Katrina – before being appointed by President Obama to lead ONC. ON THE RECORD On Twitter, many of DeSalvo's health industry colleagues applauded the move: Hear hear! And congrats @Google - you got a good one. @KBDeSalvo weaves “bold” and “insight” in a way that has served the nation well. Looking forward to hearing what you’ll (both) do next! https://t.co/jhPybxm6jx — Jitin Asnaani (@jitin) October 18, 2019 the movement to open up more health data just got a massive shot in the arm! woot! congratulations @KBDeSalvo and to @dtfeinberg for building a great team! https://t.co/M3515KMYNL — Aneesh Chopra (@aneeshchopra) October 18, 2019 Great pick! Congrats @KBDeSalvo @Google https://t.co/yhVyRKQHjl — Farzad Mostashari (@Farzad_MD) October 18, 2019 "I am thrilled to join this great team and excited about the opportunity for impact on health," DeSalvo tweeted in response. Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.