Cloud's vital signs remain stable

There was fear in the cloud computing industry that the recent outage of Amazon's virtualized offering would all but cause the platform to flat-line in the medical field. However, due to the fact that the Affordable Care Act requires both electronic health records and care providers to display best technology practices, the healthcare industry will not likely discount the cloud, reports Med City News.

"These examples illustrate that even the most well-engineered infrastructure can fail due to human mistakes, operating system bugs and unanticipated consequences of change," wrote John Halamka, CTO of Harvard Medical School and contributor to Med City News.

Halamka also professed his belief in the system as an ideal computing mode for the storage of EHRs. However, in order to optimize the cloud for use by doctors, nurses and hospitals, new technologies and procedures must be implemented to dela with the rare cases in which downtime does occur.

Another concern regarding medical clouds is security, which needs to be stringent. According to Next Gov, all electronic medical records, whether they are cloud-enabled or not, should include some form of data encryption.