The 2019 Market Guide for Cloud Service Providers to Healthcare Delivery Organizations (HDOs) has been published by Gartner. It includes a study of the healthcare cloud market and points out how the cloud may be a practical alternative for healthcare companies in search of greater productivity and flexibility than is possible using traditional on-premises infrastructure.
Numerous healthcare companies are now seeing the importance of cloud-based solutions and how smart use of the cloud could help increase efficiency, get rid of wastage, and lower the cost of healthcare services. The industry might lag behind other industries with regards to cloud adoption, yet the landscape is changing fast as the healthcare cloud market grows.
Healthcare CIOs are currently looking at the cloud as an expansion of their internal system. Although at first there was a big deal of skepticism regarding the cloud because of the security threats and potential for expenses to get out of hand, there is now common acceptance that the cloud could work as an IT service delivery model and the healthcare market is now far more accepting of the cloud. Adopting cloud-based infrastructure and cloud services has real benefits to be gained. HIPAA rules can be met, and associated risks can be lowered to an acceptable level.
Gartner has responded to the increase in cloud adoption in healthcare by creating a market guide for HDOs. This guide specifies and talks about the market, assesses the direction of the market and tells the most prominent vendors that are supporting HDOs in transitioning to the cloud.
Gartner has split the market into four sections to help healthcare companies distinguish cloud companies and their services. The top tier obviously includes the big cloud service providers (CSPs) like Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), Google (Google Cloud) and IBM (IBM Cloud). The second tier includes smaller CSPs that offer more specialized solutions for the healthcare industry including Healthcare Blocks and Virtustream.
The third tier is made up of vertical market players offering web hosting for electronic health records. Included in this tier are hosting providers like Atlantic.Net that offer secure, HIPAA-compliant hosting solutions for electronic health records to enable EHRs to be used from any place in real-time, together with HIPAA-compliant hosting for websites, databases, and cloud-based storage services.
The fourth tier includes platform-as-a-service providers. These are integrated delivery networks that have created their own cloud-based solutions for internal use and are currently marketing those items to other healthcare systems for use under license. An example is UK Cloud Health.
This is the second Market Guide for Cloud Service Providers to HDOs produced. Atlantic.Net was noted in the market guide for the second time for being a recognized security and compliance service provider.