Top Three Cloud Drivers: Cost Savings, DR and Need for Scalability for Healthcare Providers

A Level 3 Communications, LLC‘s study, conducted by HIMSS Analytics and designed to understand cloud use, trends and preferred vendors among healthcare organizations, was released.

The 2016 Cloud Survey is a blinded, web-based quantitative study that includes perspective from more than 100 IT decision makers at medium to large-sized hospital systems and hospital corporate offices across the United States.

What’s behind the move to the cloud?

Rating scale – “1” being a non-motivating factor and “7” being a very motivating factor.

Key Findings:

The top three cloud adoption motivators are cost savings, more robust DR solutions and the need for scalable platforms to support internal requirements.
The likelihood of healthcare providers planning to adopt cloud-based solutions for key use cases such as back office solutions, BC and DR, archiving data, health information exchange and HR or financial applications increased 65% in the last two years.
The most frequently cited cloud implementations address the ability to host patient empowerment tools (73%), the need for compute cycles capable of executing big data analytics (59%) and the need to satisfy business requirements like picture archiving and communication system (PACS) storage (55%), indicating providers are employing cloud solutions for personal health information (PHI) and non-PHI applications, alike.
The majority of respondents (77%) stated they involve their network provider early in cloud strategy discussions.
Cloud service providers Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google are all recognized among healthcare providers as industry leaders.

Brian Hoekelman, VP business and cloud ecosystem development, Level 3, said: “Healthcare organizations are tapping into cloud-based solutions to support the transformation to value-based care, from big data analytics that can improve patient outcomes to back office applications, email and record backup. In our conversations with customers, we also find that security is always top of mind. The network plays a vital role in fulfilling that need, which is why 2,500 healthcare organizations, including eight of the nation’s ten largest hospital systems and payer organizations, trust Level 3 to deploy secure, scalable and high performing communications infrastructure.“

Kyle Mumley, advisory solutions group, HIMSS Analytics, added: “Many healthcare organizations are using cloud solutions today, but this is only the beginning. Previous HIMSS Analytics research shows that CapEx spending is on the decline while OpEx spending is increasing; this study supports those findings with 85% of participants indicating plans to use the cloud in 2016. The study also shows that the primary drivers for this shift are cost savings and DR initiatives.”

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