In the race to the cloud, healthcare treads carefully

In the past three years, 21 million people had their sensitive health records hacked in breaches that were significant enough to be reported to the federal government.

The actual number is likely far higher; millions of smaller hacks likely went un-reported. The Office for Civil Rights reported that (the “OCR”), from 2009, 477 breaches affecting 500 people or more were reported. In total, the health records of 20,970,222 people were breached, according to the OCR’s website.

At CloudBeat, we’ll be debating this in several ways. First, a panel of healthcare-technology experts will gather discuss ways to improve security for cloud-based systems. In this sector, there are still significant questions and concerns: Cloud security, cloud encryption and HIPAA requirements regularly top the list.

In the past, the most sensitive records were stored on film, tape and paper charts. As data gets digitized, hospitals, physician practice groups, software and hardware companies, consulting firms and affiliated health care organizations are grappling with how to keep it secure.

Second, we’ll be inviting the major healthcare record and billing company, McKesson, to discuss how that $22 billion company is applying new big data initiatives to its data, using things like SAP’s Hana in-memory database platform in the cloud.

(CloudBeat is unique with its emphasis on customer case-studies. It’s not abstract theories and ideas — executives will reveal their hard-frought solutions to very real technology problems.)

Get it right, and the opportunity is enormous: market and legislated demand has created $35 billion health IT market which is growing at a rate of 20% year-on-year. In the U.S. alone, approximately 900,000 healthcare providers are migrating electronic health records.

So join us for the panel to learn how Scott Whyte, Vice President of IT Connectivity at Dignity Health, the fifth largest hospital provider in the nation and the largest hospital system in California, is addressing the “perfect storm” of challenges facing today’s healthcare providers and how they are using cloud computing to help solve these technical issues.

The audience will learn about Dignity Health’s journey toward HIPPA-compliant cloud infrastructure technologies in order to meet the growing needs of hospitals and healthcare delivery partners across the country — as well as the cost savings associated with this technology leap to the cloud.

Whyte will be joined by Darin Brannan, president and CEO of ClearDATA, who will address the key technology, regulatory and privacy issues facing the various constituents in the healthcare supply chain. The panel will be moderated by VentureBeat’s own executive editor, Dylan Tweney.

In the McKesson case, we’ll discuss how its big data initiatives are letting it process its ERP and financials faster than ever before, allowing it to analyze this data realtime to track which of their customers are profitable and which ones aren’t, and to make recommendations on how to make them more profitable. The session will be moderated by VentureBeat editor-in-chief, Matt Marshall

Healthcare is a hot topic: as the market matures, more mainstream cloud providers will introduce solutions specifically designed for this vertical.

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