Enabling the Future State of Healthcare IT

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the North Carolina Spring Conference this past week in Greensboro, NC.  My topic of conversation was around "Leveraging Virtualization at the Desktop to Benefit Patient Care" (Link to presentation).  This was not a presentation on VDI, but how to deliver a desktop environment that fits better to healthcare providers needs.  It was a well received topic of conversation and something that is becoming more of a realization with the technology vendors, both application and datacenter based, maturing and building with the end goal of creating an "as-a-service" for our healthcare providers in mind.

The keynotes were the night before and they were on some very interesting topics on some of the trends in Disease Registries and the Health Information Exchange (HIE).  They discussed items such as National Health Information Network (NHIN), Centralized Electronic Health Records (EHR) Architectures and Biomedical Informatics. While all things that were out of my specific area of expertise, all were very enlightening at the developments that are coming about in our healthcare system.  Outside all of the medical jargon, terms and techniques, it was very clear that Health Information Technology (HIT) will have to be up to the task in building the foundation to enable these initiatives that are going on in the industry. Leveraging virtualization and specifically the virtual private cloud are critical to creating the kind of dynamic environments that will be able to house and maintain the amount (and kinds) of data that will be flowing in and out.

Security and continuity of this data are very important.  While security is still a large debate from a cloud perspective, there is a lot of attention being given to ensure this is not a detriment to moving forward. Solutions from EMC such as RSA Archer assist with compliance monitoring of our clouds, both private and public.  

From a continuity standpoint, I believe we can start to nod our heads in the same direction that high availability is being addressed full steam ahead by numerous vendors.  Two weeks ago at EMC World, we saw technologies in storage from EMC such as vPlex and Data Domain deduplication that feed into building a rock solid, efficient and always on infrastructure.  These technologies coupled with the advancements in high availability computing technologies such as Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) and the features that are native to VMware vSphere provide the tools necessary for the private cloud.    

In healthcare, this is critical not just to supporting the iniatitives discussed earlier, but in benefitting patient care.  Which in the end, is really the end goal in mind.