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Monthly Archives: March 2017

How will IT and Technology affect the future of Health Care?
Technology March 10, 2017
How will IT and Technology affect the future of Health Care?

Health care as we know it is forever changing because of technology. Never before has there been such significant transformation of health care. New high-tech innovations created for health care are producing a broad range of benefits for both patients and medical professionals.

This year is of great importance for every health care provider.  It’s the year all medical records need to become electronic. This is not a surprise for medical professionals. It’s something that every medical professional has been working on leading up to 2014. It’s a federal mandate and every health care provider needs to demonstrate the use of electronic medical records by 2015 or receive possible penalties for non compliance.  Many health care providers are utilizing electronic medical record solutions from market leader Epic. While this has been a an overwhelming amount of work for most health care providers the long term benefits are limitless. Imagine when all medical research, treatment choices and patient history are electronic. All of this data can be analyzed and calculated in real-time to ultimately make better diagnoses.

One of the great challenges with health care today is providing patient care in rural and remote geographic regions. With current shortages of medical professionals this becomes even more difficult. The reality is patients who live in distant locations need to travel far to receive health care or the medical professional needs to make the long trip to treat patients. With solutions like American Well and HealthPresence patients can connect with medical professional from their home. These solutions are not available everywhere yet because of state laws but where they are available the benefits are substantial. Patients in remote areas can save time travelling long distance for preventable emergency room visits. Likewise, medical professionals can treat more patients using virtual solutions. Of course, remote consultations are not suitable for every medical condition but they are effective for many conditions or follow up consultations from treatment.

Not only are new emerging technologies providing patients with easier access to medical professionals but also health care professionals are using this technology to consult and collaborate with other medical experts and peers. Common in health care are medical consults where one medical professional meets with another medical professional to review a patient case and discuss treatment, procedures and diagnoses. The use of video conferencing and web conferencing solutions is become widespread within health care to provide medical professionals with the ability to meet face-to-face virtually with other health care experts and share patient records and charts. The use of this technology allows medical professionals to consult with anyone in the world. Not only are these technologies being used for consults they are also being used to bring remote medical experts in to operating rooms during procedures.

Growing fast in the consumer market is wearable mobile devices that track and monitor your health. There are wearable mobile devices that record your heart rate, sleep patterns, types of exercise and caloric burn. Not only is this one of the fastest growing mobile device markets it also contains mainstream manufacturers such as Nike and Samsung. Never before has it been so easy to monitor your own heart rate and health activity. The general idea is that by having this real-time personal health information you can set goals and improve your health.

 

Technology is truly transforming healthcare from every end of the medical spectrum. This new health care world with technology at its center empowers the patient. Patients have easier access to medical professionals through technology. The possibilities of medical data analytics after the completion of the federal mandate to electronic medical records may open new possibilities to how diagnoses are handled and accuracy of treatment. Finally, wearable health care technology provides health awareness and motivation to improve health. These technology innovations are reshaping healthcare today, imagine the impact from technology in ten more years!

The Benefits of Back-up Technologies
Storage March 9, 2017
The Benefits of Back-up Technologies

Data loss can be avoided with the use of data backup technologies. Whether you are backing up personal or business data you can copy and archive your data very easily today with the multitude of data backup solutions available in the marketplace.

Time and time again you hear about people or businesses that have loss data or their data became damaged. The loss of the data or corruption can be caused by any number of occurrences. For instance, a simple power outage or surge. Another common culprit for data loss or corruption is component failure of computer hardware. Additionally, software can be incorrectly saving data and it becomes irretrievable or damaged. It’s a long list of causes that can effect data. It’s a best practice for any person or business to utilize data backup technologies to prevent and reduce possible data loss and corruption.

For individuals, there are many affordable data backup solutions to copy your data. Two easy approaches are to use a USB flash drive or USB external drive. First check the total amount of data you currently have and then select a drive with enough capacity to meet the amount of data you have. Drives are not as costly as in years past. In fact, you can easily find one terabyte drives for less than $100 USD. If you don’t want to use a physical external data backup solution then there are plenty of cloud based data backup services you can subscribe to.  A few of the common cloud data backup services are Dropbox, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Carbonite and CrashPlan. Some people even use duplicate data backup solutions to make sure their valuable data is safe. Consider using both a cloud data backup service and a USB external drive to give you supplementary data backup.

For businesses, whether you are a small business or a large Fortune 500 company, data backup technology is absolutely necessary. For some industries, such as financial services and health care, there are government regulations to copy your data and retain it for a specified number of years. If your business is in the health care of financial services markets and do not backup your data you could face severe financial penalties for not being within compliance. Backing up your data can be just as easy for businesses; it’s just the scale of the data backup solutions that is greater as a result of the larger amounts of business generated data. Protect your business and backup your data.

Besides backing up your data to ensure your business meets government regulations and is within compliance another driver for data backup solutions is business continuity. There are factors outside of our control than can cause a business to be interrupted and loose data. Examples are natural disasters, severe weather or even human made disasters. Businesses need to plan for these type of unforeseen events. Plans like this are called disaster recovery plans or business continuity plans. The basis for these plans is always data backup solutions. Think about what would happen to your business if you didn’t backup your data and an unexpected event happened that caused you to temporarily relocate your business and your computers and servers were all damaged. How long would it take for you to get your business operational and running again? How long could your business operate without the data? What is the cost to your business when it is not running? All of this can be avoided by backing up your data with data backup solutions. For large organizations, some of the leading data backup solution companies are EMC, NetApp, Symantec and CommVault.

Don’t assume that you will not loose data and that your data cannot get corrupted. Find the time today to backup your data. Reduce your risk of a potential data loss nightmare. Data backup solutions are a necessary evil. You may not like spending the time and cost to backup your data but when you accept the fact that the risk is too great it’s an easy decision whether or not to back up your data.

What is the Cloud?
Cloud Computing March 8, 2017
What is the Cloud?

One of the most vocalized terms in use today is “the cloud”. This two-word saying is a metaphor for the Internet. For many years engineers would use cloud silhouettes in network drawings and diagrams to represent the Internet. This is still common practice today. However, in recent years the term “the cloud” is also synonymous with virtualization and cloud computing.

Most people don’t realize that they are most likely using several cloud services. Some examples are Google Gmail – cloud based email, Netflix – cloud based video streaming, Facebook – cloud based social networking and Dropbox – cloud based data storage. All of these cloud services you use over the Internet in place of your computer hard drive. The cloud is the opposite of your hard drive and local storage.

For a very long time organizations have swayed back and forth on which architecture and delivery model for applications and services is the most reliable, secure and scalable. Businesses have debated whether or not to build out infrastructure and deliver applications and services internally from on premises solutions or forgo the build out instead to purchase cloud subscription services. Today’s solutions offer more flexible deployment models where companies can utilize hybrid and blended architectures with services delivered from both on premises infrastructure and the cloud.

There are many benefits to the cloud delivery model. The most prevalent is the reduction in capital expenditure. To build out on premises infrastructure for application and services money would be spent on hardware and software. In comparison, a cloud model would not require a capital expenditure for hardware and software but instead require an operational expenditure for the cloud subscription service. Two great examples of cloud services used by large companies are Salesforce and WebEx. Companies that utilize these cloud services pay an ongoing operating expenditure. Sure companies could purchase on premises CRM and Collaboration solutions similar to Salesforce and WebEx but they wouldn’t get the benefits of the cloud.

Businesses today are looking for cloud based services fro competitive advantage. It’s costly to stand infrastructure up and tear it down project after project. Also, building out infrastructure on premises takes time and does not provide flexibility to easily scale up and down as needed or when temporary service is a requirement. There are many companies providing infrastructure as a cloud service. Some of these companies are Google, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Rackspace.

Some of the other benefits for cloud services are the ability to quickly scale and ramp up as needed. In particular, for geographically distributed companies cloud services provide the needed wide-reaching access. Remember the alternative would be adding more infrastructure to scale and distribute infrastructure for people across geographies.

Another advantage for businesses utilizing cloud services versus building out on premises infrastructure is maintenance and support. Enterprise infrastructures require regular maintenance and support for staying current on software releases and hardware lifecycles. Upgrading hardware and software can be very expensive for an organization. In comparison, with cloud solutions the cloud service provider is responsible for maintaining and keeping the platform current.

For individuals, “the cloud” is an ideal place to purchase subscription services for email, data backup and also video streaming or on demand. For businesses, it dependents on the size of your business and operating models. Putting aside those factors, “the cloud” is accommodating for fast deployments when you need to deploy applications or test applications immediately.