Q4 Industry Report: Shadow IT's positives and negatives within healthcare
Datica Alumni — Former Chief Marketing Officer
The Winter installment of Datica’s quarterly industry report is now available. The report examines shadow IT as both a growing security threat to health IT, but also as a unique and unrivaled enabler for innovation when managed appropriately. Shadow IT as a topic is quite the paradox—this report tries to help make sense of it.
The changes in one year between 2017’s AWS re:Invent conference and this year’s edition were stark. We blogged about some of our observations. In certain ways, the topic of shadow IT was a polarizing conversation throughout the conference. On the one hand, most vendors at the conference were promoting tools to control costs, security, and compliance of AWS so as to curb factions of shadow IT development. But on the other hand, David Deas, Corporate Director of Innovation and Knowledge Analytics at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis, got up on stage and talked about how HIPAA compliant and HITRUST certified versions of “shadow IT” became a defining enabler for his institutions initiatives.
It’s that dichotomy we’ve heard throughout 2017 and chose to examine in Q4’s report.
Readers will find a timely, in-depth summary of AWS re:Invent 2017 from the point of view of health IT.
We scoured what the industry has to say, and extracted the most important points of information for readers. We also went to see what the analysts are saying.
As with the Spring report’s op-ed from Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, we were graced with Sue Schade’s point of view in this report.
Few people have had to grapple with the challenges of shadow IT like Sue throughout her career. Back in 2015, we interviewed Sue for our Healthcare Innovators series (since then has been converted to a podcast format). She shared stories and gave solid advice about managing shadow IT in her role as CIO of Hospital and Health Centers at Michigan Medicine at the time. We are thrilled she was willing to give insight to the topic.
We hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading!
