Five key considerations for healthcare facilities before moving to the cloud

The cloud. It seems like everyone, from technology pundits to mothers in TV commercials is, talking about how computing is moving to the cloud – the delivery of applications to distributed users from a central location rather than putting software on individual PCs or local servers.

There is certainly an element of truth to that. Gartner estimates that the cloud market will reach $150 billion by 2013. Among the reasons for this sudden interest in cloud-based computing and communications are the need for collaboration among the increasing number of remote and mobile workers, several office locations, a desire to improve patient service and the ever-present goals of improving operational excellence while driving down technology equipment and healthcare management costs.

But what does that really mean for healthcare facilities? Do you now need to abandon your current technology investment and move it to the cloud? If you don’t perform a complete rip-and-replace right now, do you risk being left behind and losing market share to more cloud-savvy competitors?

That’s certainly the way the so-called experts make it sound. Yet many of those with their heads firmly entrenched in the cloud are choosing to ignore the realities of business in general and healthcare facilities in particular. To help you decide whether you’re ready to move to the cloud, here are some important elements to consider.

1. Distributed vs. centralized enterprise
The first consideration should be whether your health facility operates out of a single location or has one or two primary locations and multiple satellite offices (like most mid- to large-sized healthcare facilities). If all of the doctors, nurses and staff work out of one facility, and that’s all you plan to have, you may not need a cloud-based solution. But if you have multiple office locations or a significant number of employees traveling between offices who need full, instant access to your network, moving to the cloud simplifies management of communications and applications – which, in turn, improves collaboration between medical staff.

With cloud-based unified communications, for example, the technology is hosted in a single location and services are delivered to the others. This method eliminates the need to have IT staff in each office location or have them travel between locations to provide support. It also makes it easier to keep software and services up to date, since the central host is being updated rather than each individual user’s equipment. Users are able to work together more efficiently through features such as web conferencing,and manage their individual communication needs in a way that fits the work they perform.

2. IT staff size and capabilities
The next consideration is the size of your IT staff. In the past few years, many healthcare facilities have pared their IT staffs, particularly in maintenance functions. Additionally, while technology has continued to advance at an ever-accelerating pace, very little has been spent on training or upgrading skill sets. As a result, as we come out of the economic downturn, your IT staff may not be properly prepared to help you take advantage of new technologies internally – especially with the complexities and robust security requirements of today’s communications technologies.

Cloud-based computing solves that issue because the burden of keeping up with technology advances is shifted to the service provider. Your staff can continue to focus on patients and difference-making projects while commodity services are managed by outside specialists in those areas. You maintain overall control, but don’t have to expend staff time (and budget) to keep commodity services at peak levels.

3. Prepare the infrastructure – ditch the public Internet
Once you’ve determined that the cloud is right for your facility, it’s important to look at your network infrastructure. Networks at healthcare facilities with multiple satellite or affiliate offices are often a hodgepodge of carriers and equipment that were built over a period of years. Many times they were based more on expediency than on an enterprise-level plan.

With cloud computing, an inadequate infrastructure can quickly become overwhelmed by the sudden uptick in voice, video and data traffic. When that occurs, you will become frustrated and will experience a level of service from your cloud-based applications that doesn’t meet your expectations.

But there’s more to it than bumping up bandwidth. Using the public Internet as the basis for your cloud leaves a lot to chance. Despite improvements in recent years, it’s still not reliable enough, in large part because no one is actually managing it end-to-end. All it takes is one failure somewhere along a very long chain to bring your business to a crashing halt.

A fully managed Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network provides a better alternative for both reliability and network performance. When configured correctly, an MPLS network will have multiple connections and redundancies built in; if the primary carrier’s network goes down for any reason, it will automatically switch over to another that is still operating, providing the high-level business continuity and disaster recovery that many healthcare facilities still lack today.

Moving to an MPLS doesn’t necessarily mean replacing all your old carriers right away. But it does mean layering in tools to help you manage them more efficiently.

4. Be able to prioritize network traffic
With the Internet, all traffic looks the same – which means if patient documents arrive at the same time as last night’s highlights from ESPN, the latter may win out.
A fully managed MPLS network provides one quality of service (QOS) and routing capability over the entire network. It allows you to prioritize traffic by business case rather than simply on the type of traffic (video, voice, data, etc.) to ensure that business-related data always goes ahead of non-business data. It also provides the ability to accommodate changes in enterprise use, expanding at peak times and contracting at lower times so you’re paying for what you actually use rather than having to over-provision to handle the highest volume.

5. Controlled migration or rip-and-replace?
Once the infrastructure is in place, it’s time to start moving applications to the cloud. One of the prevailing myths is that this is an all-or-nothing proposition. In reality, migration to the cloud is a complex proposition, so performing a complete rip-and-replace is a bad business decision fraught with risk.

A better approach is to start with smaller, lower-risk environments, such as a satellite office, and implement less complex applications, such as a cloud-based communications platform. Typically you won’t be housing the software at the satellite office, so it provides an ideal “lab” with which to work. You can work slowly, test the procedures, refine them and ensure that they are fully integrated into your business processes. From there, you can migrate as healthcare business needs dictate.

Ready or not, the future is coming
The healthcare industry is highly competitive, so you can be sure if you’re not looking at cloud solutions and how to speed adoption of the latest technologies, your competitors are.

But there’s no need to go it alone. The right partner, particularly one that offers an MPLS network, can help you migrate to the cloud intelligently and successfully, allowing you to achieve the operational excellence you demand while delivering superior patient care.

James Whitemore is executive vice president of Smoothstone IP Communications, a provider of cloud-based communications for enterprise-level companies (www.smoothstone.com). He can be reached at jwhitemore@smoothstone.com.