In the past decade especially, many healthcare organizations have begun to shift their view of IT from a line item to an asset.  As the capabilities of IT to improve quality of care and simultaneously cut  costs continue to grow, information technology is garnering greater focus as a part of providers’ overall business strategy.  Many providers are commonly using information technology to drive quality, profitable market share, customer satisfaction, human resources, financial management, and innovation strategies.

Cloud computing is a technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access.  Cloud computing promises enormous benefits for healthcare community. These could include improved patient care, improved accessibility to information, and new delivery models that will make healthcare more efficient and effective.  And cloud computing can help do all of this in a cost-effective way.  As with any new technology or service, there are risks and concerns to go along with the potential benefits.

In this session, hear from Emory Healthcare Chief Information Officer, Dedra Cantrell and learn how Emory Healthcare was able to improve healthcare technology delivery and lower costs significantly. Healthcare Provider technology departments struggle today with data center management, network architecture and bandwidth, compute resources, application support, security, systems integration, and doing all of this and more on evermore constrained resources within the context of meaningful use guidelines. Emory Healthcare partnered with GNAX to create one pool of resources that can be leveraged to enable better performance in all these areas while lowering costs - a Healthcare Ecosystem. Ms. Cantrell will cover the details of developing a formidable disaster recovery solution, slashing bandwidth costs, utilizing the cloud to offload second tier applications, reducing and redirecting staffing needs and enabling meaningful health information exchange and how this Healthcare Ecosystem can be created and exploited in your organization.

Dedra Cantrell

Jeff Hinkle