Considerations for Choosing Public or Private Cloud-based EHRs

Healthcare organizations are moving different IT infrastructure applications to the cloud. Cloud-based EHRs in particular are examples of applications that are migrating the cloud. There are several reasons why organizations choose to move their EHRs to the cloud, including budget and IT resources. Moving any application to the cloud can help organizations save resources. Public cloud solutions host, manage, and maintain datacenters, so provider organizations do not have to produce the resources to host the applications. Organizations that do not use cloud computing for applications are charged with purchasing the hardware and software to deploy and maintain the application. This requires expensive hardware purchases that need to be updated every three to five years as well as the necessary software. These purchases also require staff to manage and maintain the equipment. As health IT solution become more complex, they require special expertise to run which can be expensive.