Although it was named, it was hard to achieve in the past because the cost of bandwidth made it impractical: only 10 or 15 years ago, a physician would pay thousands of dollars a month for the blistering high-speed connectivity that powers the cloud. Thanks to cheap, ubiquitous broadband, it can now become an affordable reality.

The benefits of this new reality will probably, eventually, accrue most to smaller outfits: private practices or rural hospitals that can't afford to waste resources setting up their own IT departments and who don't want the stress of making sure their data is protected by point-in-time redundancies and other standard back-up protocols. With cloud, someone else is doing it for them.

"It reduces the technology [demands] for medical practices. We really see it as the solution for smaller private practices who don't have lots of infrastructure and who won't need to pay for installations," says Emily Peters, a spokeswoman for Practice Fusion.

Although a Software-as-Service (SaaS) provider - like Gmail - rather than a Storage as Service provider (or SaaS, and yes, it's confusing) - like, say, Amazon's S3 web-based storage service - Practice Fusion does house all EMRs in their own Texas and Florida-based data centers. She notes that a typical EMR software and storage installation for a doctor's office could reach $40,000 per user, so an average three-person practice might be set back $120,000 putting in a full records system and the means to back it up. Practice Fusion is free (and "paid for" through Gmail-like targeted advertising).

"If there's one thing I would say that often gets lost in the noise, it's that the cloud is about economics. Cloud storage is an economic delivery model for access to storage, and it's not about a new technology. It's a new way of doing the same thing we've done before," Kermani notes.

Big picture cost savings

But is it truly economical? In general, cloud storage providers charge around 10 to 25 cents per gigabyte of data transmitted to, or from, the cloud (in other words, downloading or uploading), as well as a monthly maintenance fee. For health care centers moving or accessing a lot of data, these costs can add up.

But Nirvanix, a San Diego-Calif.-based cloud storage company, argues that the cost savings of cloud storage over the traditional medium of tape are realized when taking into account the whole project.

"We have some of our enterprise customers telling us our costs are at or below their long term costs of ownership of tape," Nirvanix CEO Jim Zierick tells DOTmed News. This is because while the tape itself doesn't have any "costs" month to month, it does require an expensive IT department to maintain it as well as programs and procedures to back it up and store it.

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