Cloud Computing

In August last year, health secretary Matt Hancock ordered a review of ongoing plans to replace IT systems at the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England, NHS Improvement, the Health Research Authority and the CQC. The IT project, known as the Future Services Programme (FSP), will replace the current contract with French-headquartered Atos, which ends in April 2020. Following Hancock’s review, NHS England confirmed the FSP would now support Google’s G-suite technologies and other cloud-based services, subject to a pilot phase. This represents a significant move away from the mainly Microsoft-based systems, which have traditionally been used by NHS organisations. However, CQC’s board decided to pull out from the FSP in November, amid concerns that it was not appropriate for the needs of the regulator’s staff.  A CQC spokesperson denied the change of heart was related to Hancock’s review of the contract. “CQC will not be procuring services via the FSP due to the diverse and different needs of CQC’s user groups, such as the geographical spread of the workforce and remote working needs for inspection staff,” the spokesperson told Healthcare IT News. He added that CQC’s plans to replace the Atos contract next year were “still in the process of being looked at.” NHS England told Healthcare IT News that the FSP remained focused on transitioning away from the existing Atos agreement by April 2020. “As part of this programme is a technology refresh, alternative technologies and ways of deploying technology are currently being trialled to inform the strategy,” a spokesperson said. They added, that in line with government policy, instead of re-procuring a single provider, the FSP will “be leveraging a range of existing cloud-based contracts, as well as letting a small range of contracts over the next 12 months for the various elements of the service.” Over the last six months, more than half of the devices across the relevant NHS organisations have been upgraded to the latest cloud-based versions of Office 365 and Windows 10. The majority of the remainder are due for completion by the end of this financial year, NHS England said. NHS Improvement and the Health Research Authority declined to comment on the FSP plans.

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There’s little debating that healthcare and technology are at an interesting intersection right now. So many big ideas, so much promise. But wide-scale transformation doesn’t just happen. “All the ideas need doers, those who enable action to shift ideas to execution,” Google Cloud Director of Global Health Solutions Aashima Gupta said at the HIMSS19 Cloud Computing Forum. Three such doers also took the stage to offer a glimpse of how they are using cloud computing today and hints about the future: NewYork-Presbyterian, Mercy and Humana. “By 2022, we’re expecting to move the majority of our applications and infrastructure to the cloud, leaving just 20 percent on-premises,” Vice-President for Analytics and Clinical Systems at NYP, David Vawdrey, said. It’s not merely embracing the cloud for cloud’s sake. Vawdrey said it’s to improve patient experience, make the hardest parts of tech invisible to users and equip them with patient-facing technologies such as virtual visits. “Imagine you are asking financial advice. You call the 1-800 number, and Warren Buffett answers the phone,” Vawdrey said. “This is the vision we’re trying to create with telehealth.” Antonio Melo, Director of Humana’s Digital Experience Center, said it’s working to shift from an institution-first model to one that is person-first. “We’re interested in providing care where people spend the majority or a lot of their time,” Melo said. “How do we reinvent who is improving care in the home? How do we create contextually relevant experiences for what might be considered low-level care? We’re talking about lifecare, and it’s an entirely different thing.” While acknowledging the cultural shift required to move considerable data sets into the cloud, Curtis Dudley, Vice-President of integrated Performance Solutions at Mercy, said that moving to the cloud has also enabled the system to commercialise its cloud services and, in turn, offer them to other hospitals. Cloud-based “descriptive analytics has led to the development of data science, AI and machine learning,” Dudley said. “Our goal is analytics at the speed of thought so they can walk into meetings to actually make decisions.” NEXT UP FOR MERCY? “Our future on the cloud side is going to be more and more healthcare data in the cloud. We’re working with Epic, Azure [and] Google, and our view is the cloud analytics competent is reaching inside four walls of the hospital and accessing the data in our datacentre. We are sharing data with third parties today through the cloud, in more than 200 different places,” Dudley said. “The more we do, the more people want, internally and externally.” Humana Edge CTO Jeff Hawkins said embracing the cloud opens doors to innovation. “Cloud is important for the future of how we engage our consumers. We’re taking an approach of automation over lift and shift,” Hawkins said. “We are not moving to the cloud for speed and resiliency, though we think we’ll achieve those. The fundamental drive of the cloud is to improve the experience of our consumers.” NYP’s Vawdrey agreed that it’s about patient and caregiver experience. “We want to provide a more comfortable, relaxed environment, where caregivers can deliver high quality, high satisfaction for low acuity patients,” Vawdrey said. “That’s using tech to re-humanise rather than de-humanise healthcare.”

It’s not for cost-savings on storage and compute. Instead, NewYork-Presbyterian, Mercy and Humana are harnessing the cloud to improve patient and clinician experience.

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