Datica Reveals Findings from Hospital CIO Cloud Perspectives Survey

Datica™ today released its 2018 CIO Cloud Perspective Survey titled “Healthcare Cloud Take-off: Waiting for the Fog to Clear.” The survey report has uncovered why chief information officers mark cloud migration as a pressing priority but also includes new details on why shifts to the cloud are happening slowly. From the survey, 17.7 percent of the respondents say they work with healthcare organizations that have more than 50 percent of the existing software infrastructure remotely hosted or in the cloud. Nearly 15 percent of those who took the survey say 25-50 percent of their infrastructure is cloud-based.

Healthcare systems that have taken an on-ramp to the cloud are still in the minority, but the respondents of this survey who have made the cloud shift a reality are learning what works and what doesn’t. In 2015, and prior to cloud hosting becoming a mainstream topic in the medical industry, a paper from the Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research concluded that hospitals of all sizes would use cloud-based Healthcare Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Platforms to deliver healthcare information services with low cost, high clinical value, and high usability. Now, three years later, roughly 20 percent of hospitals have adopted those cloud-based infrastructures.

Compliance, security, and privacy key to cloud adoption

Another finding: Compliance, security, and privacy are the three primary concerns for those hospital CIOs who have considered implementing digital health technology from outside vendors. The survey questions drilled down deeper to uncover the following:

• More than half of the respondents have concerns (52.57%)
• Slightly less than half say they are comfortable assessing compliance of vendors (44%)
• A mere 3.43 percent stated no concern for cloud-hosted applications because they weren’t allowed

“These survey findings mirror what we’ve been hearing in high-level conversations at Datica,” said Travis Good, MD, CEO and Chief Privacy Officer for the company. “Although cloud hosting for healthcare has become mainstream, the understanding of and confidence in the cloud to meet the exacting standards of the highly regulated industry is still a major concern for healthcare systems.”

Even though new tools and changes in the regulatory environment have made cloud a safe option for storing sensitive information, including Protected Health Information (PHI), the survey shows the majority of survey respondents do not have a strategy for moving their data centers to the cloud. Although nearly 60 percent of those who took the survey place cloud hosting in their organizations’ Top 10 priorities, only about 30 percent have a strategy in place.

Download the Datica 2018 Hospital CIO Survey Report here.

About Datica’s Hospital CIO Survey Conducted around the 2018 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual conference in Las Vegas, and with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) CIO members, the research sought to provide an in-depth look at the current state of the cloud from the seat of the chief information officer of leading hospital organizations. An executive of Datica outlined the survey in person at the CHIME CIO forum at HIMSS18. Using an online survey, CIO leaders from 175 leading healthcare organizations participated in this research and final results were tabulated in April. Datica segmented survey responses and provided analysis to reveal five key findings for the report.

About Datica The Datica Platform is designed for those who store, manage and share protected health information (PHI) in the cloud; it manages all ongoing compliance and security burdens found within the exacting standards of HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR, and GxP. Customers can license and deploy cloud-native applications on their own cloud account, or tap Datica’s cloud account for compliance, security and electronic health record integration expertise when launching and managing applications. Customers of the Kubernetes-enabled Datica Platform include mid-to-late stage startups to Fortune 100 companies across the healthcare spectrum: solution providers, hospital organizations, pharmaceutical giants and nationwide health insurance payers. For more information, go to Datica.com.