Technology — both infrastructure and applications — should be aligning and stretching itself to not only support the rate of change in healthcare, but also to influence the same.

On the infrastructure side, growth in WAN and LAN technologies (fiber-optic and copper for 10GbE/40GbE, and beyond) coupled with their wireless counterparts (4G thru WiMAX and LTE) would create the required pervasive healthcare enterprise that can aspire to be always at service.

Broadband connectivity to the desktop/handheld at the point of care is perhaps the most justified of the use cases for wireless broadband amongst all applicable industrial situations.

Such an infrastructure would also enable transformations like outpatient and interdisciplinary care by reducing the inherent logistical conflicts involved.Telepresence and use of RFID technology would be key requirements for enabling telemedicine and for supporting growth in outpatient care.

On the application side, be it through the use of packages or custom development, the tactical business priorities of healthcare, such as shifting to more outpatient care, can be best supported by deploying them on internal or external private clouds that act as integrated enterprise application platforms.

Support for service-orientation (SOA), event handling (EDA), and real-time ubiquitous data access (Enterprise Mobility) have to be the key characteristics of these platforms in order for them to fully support the new business charters. The unified and most current context of patient health and scheduling details can only be delivered through such platforms.

Although very compelling for its business case of improved service and lower costs, the adoption of cloud computing for these core functions will take its own time, until all concerns related to patient safety are addressed. But the adoption has nevertheless begun with many of the packages being made available in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

To begin with, the SaaS model would promote faster compliance of the federal mandates by keeping a centrally maintained copy of the software (that keeps pace with the evolving standards), and it would enable broader implementation by providing relief from capital expenditure concerns with its pay-as-you-go pricing model.

However, when it comes to High Performance Computing (HPC) needs of research and development in healthcare, cloud computing actually becomes more of a necessity.  Processor-intensive tasks of biomedical analysis at pharmaceutical companies represent one such scenario.

Companies like El Lilly are already leading the way in this area by using the cloud (a 64 node Linux cluster) to make an elastic HPC platform available to its scientists. Healthcare is also beginning to use the cloud for Business-Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) to support claims processing for payors and suites of practice management solutions for small clinics.

These notes are excerpted from one of my recent papers, “Reading the XRays of Healthcare.” You can read the full paper by following the link.

Sreedhar Kajeepeta is Chief Technology Officer of Applications and Technology Services in the Managed Services Sector at CSC. Follow him on Twitter @Sreedhar_K