Look up for answers

How do you avoid this danger? The easiest answer is a solution that connects your on-site archive to a cloud archive. Not only do you get disaster recovery ability, you also gain enormous flexibility for the future. If you invest heavily in infrastructure to keep all your archiving in-house, you lock yourself into a single solution. If the technology makes a big leap forward, you risk being left behind.

With a cloud component to your system, however, you don’t own the massive infrastructure necessary to archive all your data, you own only the on-site storage system necessary for current studies and rent the rest. (And with some cloud archives, you pay on a per-study basis, which means you only rent what you actually are using.) This has two advantages. First, much of your infrastructure costs move from a capital expense to an operating expense. Second, if the technology changes, the cloud vendor makes the new investment, not you. To stay competitive, a secure medical cloud provider makes regular investments in the growth of its infrastructure, and those investments are made with an eye to the future. Your archive moves forward naturally with the technology, giving you the greatest flexibility possible, and it stores your data in a form that is ready to integrate with cloud-enabled, image-enabled EMRs.

If you are concerned about security, it’s time you did more research on secure medical clouds. A good medical cloud can significantly increase the security of your data. (See my previous blog for Healthcare IT News for an in-depth look at this topic.)

The bottom line is that, whatever form of archiving you choose, keep your eye on the horizon. If you look at your feet, you’ll be left behind.