From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


How onerous is that legal burden on practices looking to buy a cloud-based application?

It’s not particularly onerous. It’s the kind of thing they have to do anyway…I’d say this is something that is typical, routine work that is performed every year by health care institutions. We sign HIPAA agreements with all of our customers already. We already have remote access into their systems, and we’re exposed to their data in that regard. It’s just a process that has to be gone through. It’s nothing particularly major, nothing too difficult to overcome, but obviously moving into the cloud does add this dimension of the question: “How do you ensure your cloud provider is taking care of the responsibilities you have once you’re subcontracting that to them?” So nothing too onerous, but it will take a bit of time. 2011 will be a big year for cloud.


According to the Federal Communications Commission, close to a one-third of federally funded rural clinics and hospitals and close to a quarter of critical access hospitals lack broadband access. Is this broadband gap going to become an obstacle to broader deployment of cloud products?

You’re going to need a reasonable Internet connection or you’re not going to be able to get access to the service. But the momentum underway already, especially with health care facilities, onto broadband is huge. And it’s really a matter of time. This technology right now is the first time that advanced visualization, the really heavy number crunching and big data lifting of advanced visualization, is just coming onto the cloud. By the time the other two-thirds of hospitals have embraced this and explored the concept, the remaining third will surely be on reasonable broadband and take advantage of it.

How does the cost of having a service hosted on a cloud compare with having your own in-house server?

The way to purchase the cloud solution really is quite flexible. In fact, this is one of the great advantages of a cloud-based offering. TeraRecon has taken the time and effort and made the investment to set up the infrastructure, so adding a user, or adding some capacity, is a relatively easy thing to do. The big difference between the cloud offering and an internal solution is we can sell pure functionality. Whereas if we’re selling a software license to a hospital, they need to think about where they’re going to put the server, and how they’re going to maintain that server and so there’s an additional budget they have to take account of.

With the cloud, you can come in at the very ground level and buy the ability to do one case a week, without deploying any equipment, without having to make any kind of investment or long-term commitment…

January/February 2011 Magazine

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