While healthcare cloud adoption is in the early stages of deployment in China, the nation's healthcare industry is taking steps to embrace the cloud to achieve healthcare reform.
This is among the findings of a recent study conducted by IDC Health Insights, the latest in an ongoing series designed to evaluate the China healthcare IT market opportunities.
The study found that the top three drivers of cloud services deployment are: reducing IT costs, deploying more standard (less customized) IT systems, and deploying them faster and easier.
The three areas where cloud technology pilots and implementations are taking place are in large 3A hospitals, Regional Health Information Systems (RHIS), and in personal wellness and health management initiatives. The RHIS - with the need to collaborate and exchange data across a number of healthcare organizations, including small community health service centers and township health service centers - will benefit most from cloud technologies.
“Cloud technology is being adopted by large hospitals in China. The areas that are seeing early adopters are server, storage, and desktop virtualization. In the future cloud technologies are predicted to be widely adopted by hospitals along with at the RHIS and PHIS level. China is ripe for adoption of the 'community cloud' model given the government's long-term plans for cross-organization collaboration across the care continuum,” said Leon Xiao, senior research manager at IDC Health Insights.
Currently all hospitals in China have their own data centers that are managed by internal IT staff whose workload is heavy.