APAC Healthcare Eyes the Cloud: IDC

Asia Pacific healthcare service providers are looking at cloud adoption, according to the latest IDC Health Insights report, "Cloud Computing in Healthcare: An Asia/Pacific View."

Although the adoption is still not widespread, the future looks promising for this technology as 69 percent of IT decision makers across the region said they currently have budget assigned to cloud computing.

Findings from the survey indicate that healthcare service providers in the Asia Pacific region do not want to reduce cloud spending in the next three years.

More than half of those surveyed said they plan to spend more on cloud computing in the next three years.

"The healthcare industry is waking up to the benefits of cloud architectures in solving their human resource issues, and helping them in their strategic business goals of improving patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes, and providing collaborative healthcare," said Sash Mukherjee, senior market analyst for IDC Health Insights Asia/Pacific.

Long term benefit

Healthcare service providers now see cloud adoption beyond short-term benefits such as pay-per-use models, no implementation costs, and out-of-the-box features.

Security and connectivity issues remain the two major concerns for the healthcare industry and smaller healthcare organisations outsource their IT functions.

Server and storage capacity on demand are the key areas of cloud uptake in the healthcare industry and cloud technology is not being considered for the picture archiving area.

IDC Health Insights suggests cloud providers dispel the misconceptions and confusions in the minds of end-users especially around security to succeed in the healthcare market.

Cloud providers would also have to describe the relative advantages of private, public and hybrid clouds to end-users.