The 25th anniversary of i.s.h.med® isn’t just a time to reflect, but also a time to look forward at what we want to do in the future.
As ever, our goal is to improve health IT for providers and patients alike, by increasing the quality of health care provisioning; creating faster, more direct diagnostics, therapy and treatment; and by providing greater ways to prevent illness occurring in the first place.
Enabling innovation
Our ability to achieve these elements is greatly enhanced by the use of cloud technologies, where data can be pooled and utilized. These anonymized data points allow comparisons to be made for the first time, with the aim of finding patterns that cover populations.
Broader research will be available, with a tighter collaboration with application, while local, regional, national and international boundaries will no longer prove a hindrance.
Challenges of the cloud
However, this is not to suggest that cloud technologies provide a simple route towards improving health IT for all – there are still challenges that we at Cerner work through with our partners and clients, such as combining increasingly complex modern systems with legacy configurations to avoid disruption.
Then there are legal rules surrounding issues such as GDPR, data ownership and privacy. Regulations and their interpretations can vary across geographies, potentially requiring multiple solutions, and making cross-border collaboration between organizations more difficult.
There are also the illegal activities of others that need to be taken into consideration. Health systems can be victims of cybercriminality, so the highest level of security must be used, although there also needs to be a balance that ensures data is available to those that need it, and in good enough time to positively impact on a patient’s health.
Ensuring security
As suggested though, we are working on tackling these challenges in collaboration with our partners, to maximize security as we work towards our goal of improving health IT.
That is why our solutions are enabled for data encryption, multi-factor authentication, and encrypted communication paths. Not only do these help our solutions meet regulations, but they also offer peace of mind to patients and providers alike.
Our cloud instances contain built-in redundancies to continue smooth running, even if individual elements need to go offline. On top of this, constant testing takes place to recognize and improve the level of data security, and certifications against multiple standards are constantly achieved to ensure that organizational, technical and other measures are implemented to the highest possible level.
Privacy and data security have always been key considerations over the past 25 years of i.s.h.med as a platform for improving health IT, and the move into the cloud is just the next step in its evolution.
Please also see this blog post by SAP, outlining their perspective on Data Privacy and Security in the Cloud.
