Why the Cloud Will Dominate Meaningful Use

Like a myriad of providers, vendors and consultants are rushing to implement electronic medical records, it’s not difficult to imagine the frantic moment when meteors started falling from the sky above the dinosaurs as they stubbornly tried to evade their inevitable extinction.

The ability to adapt and evolve is the single most critical ability needed to become the strongest and longest lasting organism in any given ecosystem. In terms of technology, the more agile and lean your foundation is, the more quickly and efficiently you are able to release the features and enhancements you need to support your customers.

Many of the health IT systems available today have barely made a dent in increasing efficiency and reducing administrative waste in health care – why? I’d argue it’s because legacy vendors have lacked the ability to evolve with the needs and expectations of their users in a cost-effective way. So where do we go from here?

Consider this for a moment: Google’s search engine handles over 1 billion searches in a single given day. Millions of users have come to expect that every day Google will perform as well, if not better than it did the day before – and rightly so. What a lot of people may not realize is that Google is a company with more than 30,000 employees, a majority of whom work around the clock to improve its core product: search.

Google goes through constant enhancements, tweaks, and modifications to ensure that it remains the king of search. If Google decided to deploy a new feature that would instantly make your search experience better, or if it had to modify its software to comply with the latest mandates from Washington, you wouldn’t worry about making sure you had the latest version of Google installed, or if the version you were using was compatible with the website you wanted to search.

Since Google hosts its applications on its own computing infrastructure, not the user’s, you auto-magically get any and all enhancements right away. No load times, no waiting to install updates, no going around all of the computers in your house or office to make sure that they’re running the latest version.  As we enter the digital age, cloud computing is quickly becoming the platform on which next-generation companies are building their foundations.

Cloud computing, otherwise known as Internet-based computing, enables companies to adopt systems that are continuously improving and able to adapt to market conditions in ways that provide the highest amount of value at the lowest available cost.

The same concept is now being applied to the software that physicians are deploying in their practices. With the Internet as the core platform, physicians will be able to rely on one single vendor to keep up with industry changes such as HIPAA 5010, Meaningful Use, and ICD-10 and to improve their clinical, financial, and administrative processes.

Unfortunately, many systems were designed to resist and inhibit change, both from a technological standpoint and from a user perspective. Because of this, I feel that companies who are simply trying to repurpose their flagship products and antiquated platforms will continue to struggle, burning through gobs of their clients’ hard-earned cash as they frantically try to evade the meteor showers from above.

Mike Cuesta is Director of Marketing at CareCloud. Follow him on Twitter: @mikeatcarecloud


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