“Like many healthcare operations, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston has been grappling with how best to handle the federal electronic health record (EHR) mandate. Three years ago, it set out to get 200 outlying physician offices and the roughly 350 doctors working at them onto a centralized EHR system. It was – and continues to be – a daunting challenge that unwittingly turned BIMDC into one of the earliest known users of cloud computing. Without knowing what it was doing would later be labeled “cloud,” IT made the unique decision of hosting EHR software at a central location and building out an infrastructure to support physician access via secure Web connections. Problem is, some doctors weren’t too keen on either the EHR or cloud concepts and the going, while well-planned, has been rough in spots, says Bill Gillis, eHealth technical director at BIDMC. In an interview with contributing writer Beth Schultz, Gillis reflects on …”
Article
ITWorld, 28 February 2010
