Healthcare IT News: Here are the first steps to becoming a cloud-first hospital

David Chou

By Tom Sullivan

There’s little doubt that many hospitals are going to start moving more and more of their technological infrastructure and software into the cloud.

As that happens, consultancies such as IDC are predicting the cloud model will effectively change the way IT shops typically operate. Instead of performing many of the tasks historically considered to be information technology, for instance, hospital tech departments will become more akin to lines of business that acquire those functions, IDC’s projection suggests.

But how can hospitals considering tapping into more cloud services or even embarking on a cloud-first mindset begin?

“It starts with setting the culture,” said David Chou, CIO and Chief Data Officer at Children’s Mercy, in Kansas City, Missouri. “Most IT departments are not thinking cloud-first.”

Children’s Mercy, though, has been working to become a cloud-first hospital since the spring of 2016.

The system has more than 600 apps in its portfolio and almost all of them are in the cloud. Children’s Mercy has already moved its EHR to a hosted model, put its enterprise resource planning on Amazon’s cloud, moved enterprise messaging to Microsoft’s Azure and Office 365, subscribed to security tools in the cloud and more, according to Chou.

Read the full article via Healthcare IT News.