Faced with growing data management and privacy concerns, healthcare organizations are understandably reticent about moving their applications and patient data to the cloud. For many healthcare orgs, entrusting valuable assets to a third party can feel like “losing control” over critical processes and patient data. Can the cloud ensure strict adherence to HIPAA and PHI regulations? What about additional privacy mandates likely to come. (Think GDPR—could something similar be on its way to the US?)
With your applications and data running on Google Cloud Platform, you get security, compliance, and total control over your valuable assets. The suites that support the healthcare industry are fully compliant with HIPAA, and the major suites covering storage, applications, and more support FedRAMP – the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. FedRAMP is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.
Interoperability built in
In addition to privacy requirements and compliance mandates, GCP resolves one of the biggest challenges in modern IT operations: interoperability and data exchange. The Cloud Healthcare API bridges the gap between care systems and applications built on GCP, so your existing clinical systems become cloud-enabled, and new entrants can easily integrate with your care networks.
By supporting standards-driven data formats and protocols of existing healthcare technologies, the Cloud Healthcare API connects your data to advanced GCP capabilities, including data processing with Cloud Dataproc, scalable analytics with BigQuery, and machine learning with Cloud ML Engine, while also simplifying application development and device integration.
Data sent to GCP via the Cloud Healthcare API is controlled by your organization. Here are three standards enabled by GCP’s robust API capabilities:
- FHIR – Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources is the emerging standard for healthcare interoperability. FHIR specifies a robust, extensible data model using REST semantics for interacting with resources.
- DICOM – The established standard for storing and exchanging medical images across a wide range of modalities including radiology, cardiology, ophthalmology, and dermatology. DICOMweb is a REST API for organizing and querying medical images.
- HL7v2 – An essential communication modality for any application seeking to integrate with legacy clinical systems. The HL7v2 API implements a REST interface for ingesting, sending, searching, and retrieving HL7v2 messages.
Privacy, security, advanced analytics, and highly flexible data interoperability. These are just some of the features we will invite you to explore as you as you consider moving workloads for your healthcare organization to Google Cloud Platform.To learn more about how Google Cloud Platform can help you gain control over your PHI data and other valuable records, read the new white paper by SADA Systems.
