A scoping review of cloud computing in healthcare

Abstract

BackgroundCloud computing is a recent and fast growing area of development in healthcare. Ubiquitous, on-demand access to virtually endless resources in combination with a pay-per-use model allow for new ways of developing, delivering and using services. Cloud computing is often used in an “OMICS-context”, e.g. for computing in genomics, proteomics and molecular medicine, while other field of application still seem to be underrepresented. Thus, the objective of this scoping review was to identify the current state and hot topics in research on cloud computing in healthcare beyond this traditional domain.MethodsMEDLINE was searched in July 2013 and in December 2014 for publications containing the terms “cloud computing” and “cloud-based”. Each journal and conference article was categorized and summarized independently by two researchers who consolidated their findings.Results102 publications have been analyzed and 6 main topics have been found: telemedicine/teleconsultation, medical imaging, public health and patient self-management, hospital management and information systems, therapy, and secondary use of data. Commonly used features are broad network access for sharing and accessing data and rapid elasticity to dynamically adapt to computing demands. Eight articles favor the pay-for-use characteristics of cloud-based services avoiding upfront investments. Nevertheless, while 22 articles present very general potentials of cloud computing in the medical domain and 66 articles describe conceptual or prototypic projects, only 14 articles report from successful implementations. Further, in many articles cloud computing is seen as an analogy to internet-/web-based data sharing and the characteristics of the particular cloud computing approach are unfortunately not really illustrated.ConclusionsEven though cloud computing in healthcare is of growing interest only few successful implementations yet exist and many papers just use the term “cloud” synonymously for “using virtual machines” or “web-based” with no described benefit of the cloud paradigm. The biggest threat to the adoption in the healthcare domain is caused by involving external cloud partners: many issues of data safety and security are still to be solved. Until then, cloud computing is favored more for singular, individual features such as elasticity, pay-per-use and broad network access, rather than as cloud paradigm on its own.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12911-015-0145-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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“…This is because CC is an IT innovation for the healthcare industry that differs from traditional health IT approaches; in addition, when conceptualizing the topic of CC in healthcare, it is essential to seriously consider the healthcare context because the healthcare industry is markedly different from a common context and interpretation of CC in a general context is not necessarily adequate for healthcare [22]. To this end, past research indicates that an unspecific understanding of the CC concept in research and practice, irrespective of the intricacies of the healthcare sector, might be a major reason for why "few successful implementations" of CCSs in healthcare exist [23].…”

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