A new study designed to understand cloud use, trends and preferred vendors among healthcare organizations has been published. The 2016 Cloud Survey, commissioned by Level 3 Communications, Inc. and conducted by HIMSS Analytics was a blinded, web-based quantitative study that includes perspective from more than 100 IT decision makers at medium to large-sized hospital systems and hospital corporate offices across the United States.
The key findings of the survey were:
- The top three cloud adoption motivators are cost savings, more robust disaster recovery solutions and the need for scalable platforms to support internal requirements.
- The likelihood of healthcare providers planning to adopt cloud-based solutions for key use cases such as back office solutions, business continuity and disaster recovery, archiving data, health information exchange and HR or financial applications increased 65 percent in the last two years.
- The most frequently cited cloud implementations address the ability to host patient empowerment tools (73 percent), the need for compute cycles capable of executing big data analytics (59 percent) and the need to satisfy business requirements like picture archiving and communication system (PACS) storage (55 percent), indicating providers are employing cloud solutions for personal health information (PHI) and non-PHI applications, alike.
- The majority of respondents (77 percent) stated they involve their network provider early in cloud strategy discussions.
- Cloud service providers Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google are all recognized among healthcare providers as industry leaders.
