Health Care Reform and Cloud Computing

Organizational chart of the health plan; click on image to enlarge it.

Last Thursday, March 25th, Congress approved a bill for major health care reform, which has been a priority for several administrations and a topic of discussion and controversy for decades. I compiled below a few articles, perspectives, and summaries of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590):

• New York Times: “Final Votes in Congress Cap Battle on Health Bill“
• HealthReform.gov, managed by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
• Examiner.com, “A plain language summary of the current health care reform bill“
• American Medical Association letter to Speaker Pelosi, supporting the bill
• AARP Statement on Historic Health Insurance Reform Package
• Kaiser Permanente Comments on House Passage of the Health Care & Education Affordability Reconciliation Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

While the business side of health care will change considerably as the new regulations take effect, I think it’s also interesting to take a quick look at current and future technology improvements in patient care, such as bionics and nanomedicine. Artificial limbs that can be controlled by thought are currently being developed and tested, while nanomedicine will create breakthroughs in treating many diseases at the cellular level.

• National Geographic article, “Bionics“
• The Pentagon Channel on YouTube, “Cutting Edge Prosthetic Arms“
• UnderstandingNano.com: “Nanotechnology in Medicine – Nanomedicine“

In most business environments, business intelligence is high on the wish list to help control costs, improve performance, and identify business opportunities by discovering patterns and insights in data for improved decision-making. According to the below articles, business intelligence is also a high priority in health care:

• SearchDataManagement.com: “Business intelligence in healthcare: Special report“
• Information Management Magazine: “BI’s March to Health Care“
• BeyeNETWORK: “Trends in the Healthcare Business Intelligence Marketplace“
• The Health Care Blog: “Next Generation Healthcare Analytics“
• Healthcare IT News: “Investors keen on analytics, patient safety tech“
• Information Management Magazine: “Bringing Analytics to the Treatment Level“
• Federal Computer Week: “Tracking Pandemics –  A Closer Look at Healthcare Analytics“

Cloud-based business intelligence solutions can help health care companies achieve their goals of reducing cost, streamlining operations, and delivering better care through improved decision-making, because BI SaaS can be instantly activated and scaled to meet business requirements. Just as health care reform promises improved access to health care for more people, BI SaaS provides insights to more employees for better decision-making. But is health care ready for cloud computing? According to these two articles, the answer is “yes.”

• The Health Care Blog: “Is Cloud Computing Right for Health IT?“
• iHealthBeat: “Health Care Might Be Ripe for Cloud Computing“

If you are interested in reforming your business to drive revenue growth and profitability, improve business performance, gain insights from social media, and solve IT concerns in the cloud, consider these cloud-based solutions:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

How do you plan to reform your organization to better serve your patients and customers with cloud-based solutions?