BridgeHead Software has launched its public cloud solution for its Independent Clinical Archive (ICA), HealthStore®, powered by Microsoft Azure. HealthStore® enables health organisations to consolidate, store, protect, and provide authorized access by designated medical professionals based on comprehensive data access and governance protocols to healthcare information outside of the Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) for clinical and operational needs. The move by BridgeHead builds on years of experience offering HealthStore® in the private cloud and was a natural progression in alignment with the company’s overall cloud strategy.
Enabling Hospitals To Accelerate Their Cloud Strategies As the healthcare industry increasingly makes key decisions to embrace the public cloud, many hospitals have discovered the transition to the cloud is more complex than initially thought. Tighter budgets, coupled with rightful concerns around patient information privacy, security, compliance with regulations, and managing an ever-growing number of legacy systems; mean hospital IT staff can be daunted by the anticipated scale of the task.
The move by BridgeHead offers healthcare organisations a turnkey solution to accelerate their cloud strategies. In doing so, healthcare providers are able to take advantage of a best-of-breed healthcare data management solution for accessing and managing patient and administrative information through its lifecycle while using Azure’s compliance and privacy protections, as well as its state-of-the-art compute, storage, security among other services.
Mike Ball, Chief Business Development Officer at BridgeHead Software, comments: “With a growing number of healthcare organizations looking to integrate health and care services, the challenges facing data security, protection, access and analysis are becoming increasingly more complex. We are pleased to offer HealthStore® in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure as this will allow healthcare providers to adopt ‘cloud-first’ principles and start to use their information strategically. This will improve patient care, improve operational efficiencies, decrease cost and reduce risk.
“Microsoft offers a comprehensive cloud computing service for healthcare, with a significant footprint in hospitals across the globe and a continued dedication to the industry. Using BridgeHead’s position as a data management and clinical workflow experts, in tandem with Microsoft’s leading-edge innovation in cloud technology, we are bringing to market a very unique and valuable solution for hospitals worldwide.”
Use Cases For HealthStore® In The Cloud By adopting HealthStore® in the public cloud, healthcare IT organisations can now adopt a flexible and measured (data first) project management approach. There are numerous use cases available to hospitals adopting HealthStore® in Azure, which can often seem overwhelming. To help, Microsoft recently published a blog, entitled, “Healthcare’s ready for the cloud: 5 steps for a successful migration” offering some practical tips and guidance on where to start.
Gareth Hall, Senior Director Worldwide Health Solutions at Microsoft said: “As healthcare moves closer to a cloud-first policy, the inevitable question remains: how do providers get information locked into their applications into cloud? For healthcare organizations to transition to the cloud, whilst meeting all of their governance and compliance obligations, they need robust, reliable, compliant cloud-ready solutions that can ingest information using open healthcare data standards. Solutions, like HealthStore® in the Cloud from BridgeHead Software, can provide this clinical and administrative repository.”
