Health Care in the Cloud - public portals as a solution

At the dawn of the dot-com era, portals and information exchanges were all the rage (I designed oversaw construction of a few, myself). My recent work at MITRE on the Affordable Health Care Act's federal information hub involve my designing a portal for those states who did not want to build their own.

Patient portals are the information aggregation and user interface engines now linking several applications, such as the organization’s electronic health record, including admission, transfer, discharge, or any hospital information system.

In this article,the idea of making use of publicly available solutions is raised:

The idea is to place this very complex data into an understandable context to provide the patient with a complete view of their health, including recent diagnostics, treatments, medications, and, most importantly, the monitoring of current health data to work more productivity with their doctors.

The article rightly points out that many in health care technology personnel push back on the use of cloud computing because of the privacy and security issues around patient data. But well-architected solutions with adequate security measures abound.

Read more here...