A Case Study of the Health Cloud

Initiatives have recently been taken to facilitate effective sharing and collaboration of healthcare information. The process undertaken to manage healthcare data is always in debate. The healthcare industry is encouraged to leverage technology solution for providing improved services to patients and doctors. The chapter explains the need of the healthcare process re-engineering through the implementation of Software as a Service (SaaS). It also highlights the potential and challenges of integrating SaaS-based health cloud in the healthcare industry. This chapter explores the exciting journey of the Indian healthcare transformation through technology implementation. Moreover, the chapter discusses the different healthcare clouds and deployment models. It illustrates SaaS-based solutions for the healthcare segment and argues that cloud-based healthcare and mobile healthcare by use of portable devices can make health consultation convenient for patients across the world.

Cloud Computing for Cytopathologists

Cloud computing is changing the way enterprises, institutions, and people understand, perceive, and use current software systems. Cloud computing is an innovative concept of creating a computer grid using the Internet facilities aiming at the shared use of resources such as computer software and hardware. Cloud-based system architectures provide many advantages in terms of scalability, maintainability, and massive data processing. By means of cloud computing technology, cytopathologists can efficiently manage imaging units by using the latest software and hardware available without having to pay for it at non-affordable prices. Cloud computing systems used by cytopathology departments can function on public, private, hybrid, or community models. Using cloud applications, infrastructure, storage services, and processing power, cytopathology laboratories can avoid huge spending on maintenance of costly applications and on image storage and sharing. Cloud computing allows imaging flexibility and may be used for creating a virtual mobile office. Security and privacy issues have to be addressed in order to ensure Cloud computing wide implementation in the near future. Nowadays, cloud computing is not widely used for the various tasks related to cytopathology; however, there are numerous fields for which it can be applied. The envisioned advantages for the everyday practice in laboratories' workflow and eventually for the patients are significant. This is explored in this chapter.

Cloud Computing Location-Based Services for Quality Health Care Services Delivery

This chapter proposes a cloud computing location-based services system able to query points of interest, according to mobile users' preferences and contexts, under dynamic changes of locations. The contribution consists of providing software as a service based on Delaunay Triangulation on road (DTr) able to establish the Continuous k-Nearest Neighbors (CkNNs) on road, while taking into account the dynamic changes of locations from which queries, enhanced by users' preferences and contexts, are issued. The proposed software, implemented on a mobile cloud and exploited by mobile physicians for healthcare institutions localization and selection, considerably improves the quality of services provided for patients in critical situations by permitting real time localization of adequate resources that may contribute to save patients' lives.

Not Just Meaningful Data but Coordinated Data!

The era of data collection about health systems' performance is entering the new phase of timely and simultaneous access to diverse data sources in a systematic and coordinated approach. The concepts of harmonization and the measurement of the continuum of care have laid the ground for the pursuit of collecting, organizing, accessing, and sharing treatment and outcomes results. Service industries, faced with the need for access to multiple data sources, have adopted Information Technologies ranging from localized measurement of performance to regional monitoring of services, and finally into global networking via Cloud Computing. This chapter explores the benefits and challenges of Cloud Computing to the amelioration of medical and healthcare services given the idiosyncrasies of medicine and healthcare. A special focus is given to the extent of readiness healthcare systems manifest to measuring their performance, sharing the findings with patients and communities, and the accountability these systems demonstrate for the promises, implicitly or explicitly, they made about quality and safety of care. The implications of these promises in shaping patient expectations leading to patient and community evaluation of the healthcare services is a central theme running through this chapter.

Demystifying Quality of Healthcare in the Cloud

Healthcare services have experienced a sharp increase in demand while the shortages in licensed healthcare professionals have formed one of the toughest challenges that healthcare providers face. In addition, illness has become more complex while advancement in technology and research have expedited the rise of modern and more effective diagnoses and treatment techniques. Cloud computing allows healthcare professionals to share medical records, including all sorts of image and accuracy while new applications or workloads can be started much faster, without going through the entire procurement process or testing the interoperability of the entire infrastructure. Moreover, although the notion of organizational culture is now routinely invoked in organizations and management literature, it remains an elusive concept. However, it is clear that managing the culture is one path towards improving healthcare, and cloud computing introduces a dynamic system adaptation, affecting the quality of care. This is explored in this chapter.

Sharing Medical Information by Means of Using Intelligent Agents and Cloud Computing

From birth to death, every human being leaves a long medical history consisting of laboratory exams, records of medical consultations, records, and hospitalizations, as well as any other important information that affects the patient's health. These are known today as Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR). However, because a person's lifestyle and health are continuously changing, most of this medical information is distributed among different institutions, cities, and even countries where the specific processes were undertaken, in possession of health insurance providers or even hidden inside a drawer of the patient's home. Therefore, aiming to enhance the availability of improved medical services at reduced costs, modern information technology is being increasingly used in the healthcare sector. Researchers, developers, and companies have made efforts to develop mobile, Web, desktop, and enterprise e-health applications raising the importance of interoperability and data exchange between e-health applications and Health Information Systems (HIS). In this regard, Cloud Computing (CC) promises low cost, high scalability, availability, and disaster recoverability, which can be a natural solution for some of the problems faced in storing and analyzing EMRs. However, CC, which is mainly defined to address the use of scalable and often virtualized resources, is still evolving. New, specific collaboration models among service providers are needed for enabling effective service collaboration, allowing the process of serving consumers to be more efficient. In this chapter, the current state and trends of CC in healthcare are presented as well as a detailed collaboration model based on intelligent agents focusing on the EHR sharing subject. This model for enabling effective service in cloud systems is based on a recent research proposal related to defining a collaboration mechanism by means of Scout Movement. The chapter also includes details on the way in which services and service providers are clearly defined in this particular system.

A Survey on Research Initiatives for Healthcare Clouds

Cost reduction for hosted and managed services is one of the key promises of Cloud Computing. Healthcare is one such example of managed services that can greatly benefit by a Cloud offering. However, there are many research challenges that need to be addressed before one can deliver a mature service. This chapter provides a summary of research activities in a variety of healthcare-related Cloud initiatives. The authors highlight the key areas of ongoing research and describe others that require attention. The analysis and observations can be useful to healthcare Cloud professionals and can motivate interested researchers to initiate new efforts for better healthcare services deployed on the Cloud.

Message-Oriented Middleware on the Cloud for Exchanging E-Health Data

Cloud infrastructure has been one of the latest technologies in the e-health sector. Despite many research studies focusing on the privacy of the e-health data stored on the cloud, the ways of exchanging e-health information between client and cloud have not yet been fully addressed. Moving from this initial consideration, in this chapter, the authors evaluate the possibility of using Message-Oriented Middleware (MOMS) for exchanging data between the cloud storage and the remote device used in telemedicine and remote monitoring software. The evaluation is done using a cloud testing environment and a low bandwidth connection modem and a simulation of 50 patients taking a 10 minutes 3Lead EGC test. Some possible future directions on this architecture are suggested as well as some possible improvements.

Interoperability in Healthcare

With the advancement of technology, patient information has been being computerized in order to facilitate the work of healthcare professionals and improve the quality of healthcare delivery. However, there are many heterogeneous information systems that need to communicate, sharing information and making it available when and where it is needed. To respond to this requirement the Agency for Integration, Diffusion, and Archiving of medical information (AIDA) was created, a multi-agent and service-based platform that ensures interoperability among healthcare information systems. In order to improve the performance of the platform, beyond the SWOT analysis performed, a system to prevent failures that may occur in the platform database and also in machines where the agents are executed was created. The system has been implemented in the Centro Hospitalar do Porto (one of the major Portuguese hospitals), and it is now possible to define critical workload periods of AIDA, improving high availability and load balancing. This is explored in this chapter.

CoSeMed

E-health systems need to dynamically integrate heterogeneous types of medical sensors and provide access to streams of sensed medical data in order to properly support patient treatment. Treatment processes usually include several steps and medical departments, which means that sensors could be moved between networks of Care Delivery Operators instead of being reattached every time. Therefore, the authors propose a novel approach that allows sharing medical devices among different operators in this chapter. This means that each operator books a medical device as long as it delivers required data and is present in the operator's network, which the authors call the medical device cloud. Besides cost effectiveness, this approach can extend traditional cloud-based e-health systems, usually designed to share Electronic Health Records, by sharing the devices that emit the data. This mitigates judicial constraints because only the data sources and not the data itself are shared, and allows for more real-time access to mission-critical data.