Insight
Five Reasons Why You Should Move Your EHR to the Cloud
Many health systems have elected to host their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system using a cloud-based solution rather than building out the infrastructure required for an in-house on-premises solution. Often this decision is driven by many different factors, such as capital costs required to build out, complexity of systems to maintain and lack of available talent to do so, or security concerns. When considering multiple vendor partners, it’s essential to understand how each vendor will host your EHR system. Here are some reasons to consider this type of migration:
1. Simpler Implementation
Your cloud vendor can manage and automate much of the deployment, saving your staff significant time and allowing them to focus on other more important aspects of an implementation. Cloud providers can scale more rapidly to the changing needs of your system as you grow or shrink the environment.
2. Improved User Experience
Placing your EHR in the cloud allows you to offload the complex and tedious data center work to an experienced cloud provider. This frees up IT staff to better focus on supporting your users and clinicians, delivering an overall better user experience.
3. Superior Performance and Availability
Fully outsourced hosting platforms provide your hospital with a high-performance EHR that is stable, consistent and safe. Look for a partner who offers support staff 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to manage security updates and infrastructure and maintenance for your EHR.
Select a cloud provider with multiple geographically dispersed data centers to provide protection against downtime in the event of natural disasters, civil unrest, hardware failures, and other service-impacting events.
4. Safer Data
With the prevalence of cyber security threats such as phishing and ransomware attacks, your organization could be vulnerable to data breaching. These malicious attacks seek to damage or steal data and disrupt the processes of your otherwise healthy organization. Threats like these can severely compromise your hospital’s ability to provide quality patient care.
Cloud hosting your EHR allows you to leverage advanced security tools and protections to keep your data safe. Your provider should have multiple layers of protection and isolation for your systems, incorporate encryption for data in flight as well as at rest, leverage advanced machine learning to process log data, and surveil systems in order to identify new potential threats.
5. Improved Patient Care
According to HeathIT.gov, 75% of healthcare providers say their EHR enables them to deliver better patient care. While there is no direct correlation between hosting your EHR and patient care, there are many ways hosting can help your hospital focus on what it does best – healthcare. Letting your hosting partner manage EHR patch updates and daily maintenance can allow your team to focus on in-house IT questions.