A Closer Look at the Vertical Cloud in Healthcare Computing

In a recent note here that was stimulated by a blog note by Nicholas Carr (see: Look, ma, no servers), I raised this issue of the so-called serverless approach to the provision of internet services and then proceeded to discuss its applicability to healthcare IT (see: The Potential for "Sereverless" Healthcare Computing). Simply put, a serverless architecture, or cloud computing, means that server time is "rented" by the provider of IT services, such as a hospital, rather than owning and managing the physical computing resources.

Nicholas Carr is my favorite blogger in the area of general IT strategy and I have made frequent references in Lab Soft News to his notes in RoughType. He took my suggestion about the serverless architecture as it might apply to healthcare and pushed it even further (see: The vertical cloud). In this latter note, he refers to the "vertical cloud" by which he means the application of the serverless architecture in a vertical industry like healthcare.

In response to my original note, about serverless healthcare The PACS Designer (TPD) submitted the following comment (boldface emphasis mine):

The serverless computing concept has been around for years but is just being recognized by Dr. Bruce and others in healthcare recently. What has brought the concept into the mainstream media is the proliferation of storage solutions for images and other personal information. Even e-mail services may be renting servers for their clients or using the existing grid structure that has been developed by Dell, HP, Oracle and others. InsiteOne, a healthcare imaging storage provide, currently has over one billion image files stored for over 400 hospitals who pay a fee for each stored file which can be accessed at any time for referral. The vertical cloud continues to get bigger with time and healthcare is joining this cloud in even greater numbers. You can look at server utilization now in the same light as your electric, water, and other utilities services.

As usual in the area of PACS and radiology, TPD is way ahead of me. On its home page, InsiteOne claims that the company has now archived more than 20.5M studies and 1.5B images for radiology practices. It probably should come as no surprise that the vertical cloud is alive and well in the PACS world given the current computer storage demands in radiology.

So let's draw the logical conclusions from what we have learned from all of this in the form of an email to all hospital CEOs:

Mr. Hospital CEO, you are already storing your radiology image data remotely using a vertical cloud approach. Why not consider this same approach for other aspects of your enterprise IT services? You can divert some of the money that you have saved to your clinical labs to invest in molecular diagnostics upon which much of the future of healthcare delivery will rest.

Comments

[Adam Peters]

I am at Cerner this week observing the Veterans Administration's design review for thier Millennium lab implementation. In a couple hours I'll be touring Cerner's data center where they host health IT solutions for over one hundred clients. Part of the sales pitch is that they are up over 99.99% of the time and they will pay you if they fail to maintain that. Even if you decide to host your own servers Cerner will be happy to admin, perform updates, patches and changes for you. I'm sure there are other providers like this, I just happen to be at this one today. The point is, this really makes your IT solution a utility like service allowing healthcare administrators to focus on providing healthcare rather than worrying about server downtime stats and the resultant problems.
Adam