Vendors Curb Cloud Adoption in Health Care, CIO Says
There’s a consensus that health care providers are slower than most other industries to adopt cloud technology. The presumption has been that health care CIOs are fearful of the cloud, but that’s not the case, according to Steve Hess, CIO of the University of Colorado Health.
According to Mr. Hess, the problem is that many cloud vendors won’t sign agreements indemnifying their customers in the event of data breaches or other violations of very strict government regulations concerning patient data, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act . They’re “unwilling to sign the HIPAA agreements and unwilling to live up to service levels,” he said. He said these vendors typically include large companies that built a health care business as an ancillary service, as well as startups that built custom solutions for specific health care organizations but haven’t developed a market strategy.
Likewise, Darren Dworkin, CIO of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said that vendors — particularly those new to health care — refuse to sign those sorts of agreements because they don’t yet fully grasp the health care business. “They don’t know what it is, so they’re afraid of it,” said Mr. Dworkin.
Judy Hanover, an IDC analyst who covers health care IT, said vendors offering generic cloud software, such as infrastructure services, or collaboration and productivity applications, are more likely to shy away from signing HIPAA contracts than a provider that targets the health care industry. Vendors offering more generic services don’t grasp the complex contractual nuances, or don’t want to incur new risk, she said.
Mr. Hess, who is moving several services to the cloud as part of an IT consolidation effort, said he recently migrated to Microsoft Corp.'s Office 365 software, which is HIPAA-compliant, to replace on-premise email software for 17,000 employees. He estimates this will allow the hospital to shave roughly $14 million in costs, and helps him offload email administration to a company that is better suited to provide it – and one he said was “very willing to sign that… [compliance] agreement.”
