“One trend that we cannot deny and it keeps growing each year is cloud, especially in radiology IT,” Thompson explained. “It has been a buzz term for a couple years. We started to see an emphasis at RSNA 2020 on cloud PACS and cloud imaging IT. But we are really starting to see the vendors and the market become more accepting of it.”

Not only are radiology IT vendors talking more about cloud and how it can help medical imaging, but there has been rapid growth in major cloud providers entering healthcare, and especially the imaging side. These include Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft being much more visible in healthcare IT and numerous health IT vendors making partnership announcements with them. She said these partnerships are helping drive further adoption of cloud and in the types of services being offered to healthcare IT departments. She said this is a major shift in how data has been stored and made accessible from the past and she expected the large on-premise data storage market to shift in the coming years to more and more cloud adoption because it solves many issues.

“It’s really about re-architecting and leveraging the technical components that cloud offers. This includes containerization and the ability to scale. When you look at the U.S. market and the amount of consolidation going on with outpatient imaging centers, healthcare systems need that flexibility to scale up and expand their platform,” Thompson said.

She said there is a movement across radiology IT vendors toward becoming cloud native platforms. She said this is incremental, but that is clearly where many vendors are headed.

Thompson said providers today need to do more with less, so they are trying to find ways to maximize efficiency, and the cloud can offer than for clinical workflows, including easier access to patient images and data across healthcare systems. From an IT prospective, outsourcing data storage to the cloud can help simplify and streamline many of their functions so their limited staff can concentrate on other  needs for maintaining, updating or expanding IT systems.

Cybersecurity of healthcare data is enhanced using cloud storage vendors

Ironically, it was concerns about data security and HIPAA compliance that caused many providers to shy away from cloud over the past decade, but today they are seriously looking at how the cloud can actually enhance cybersecurity.

This is due to the fact that society’s trust of cloud storage has increased with mobile banking, everyday use of the internet, paying bills online, filing taxes online and other things where sensitive data is now transferred online all the time. Cloud computing uses sophisticated encryption of data. In addition, large cloud storage vendors have made it their business model to protect the data they are entrusted with, so they have large staffs of IT professionals and investments in data monitoring dedicated to cybersecurity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is more focus on cybersecurity than most hospitals can offer for their on-premise IT systems.

“The risk of cybersecurity and ransomware has become an increasing driver for the adoption of cloud in healthcare,” Thompson said. “We have seen high-profile healthcare organizations in the U.S., Northern Ireland, the U.K and Western Europe that unfortunately have become victims to ransomware and had patient data either taken and hacked.”

She said this trend is migrating to smaller hospitals and outpatient imaging centers where there is even less ability for IT departments to mount a massive defense against hackers and malware.  “They are easier targets and they have smaller budgets, so their IT infrastructure is less sophisticated.,” Thompson explained.

Many of these cyberattacks are not publicized and slip under the radar, so it does not appear to be a big or worrisome trend. The targets of these attacks also has expanded to the radiology and EMR IT vendor systems. Here too, cloud security may be able to help, she said.

“When you think of that sheer volume of risk, and the investment required to maintain those systems to the highest security level, the ability to outsource that, especially to an Amazon, Google or Microsoft that spend billions, it is exceptionally more than any healthcare provider could do on their own, it makes you feel safer in the storage of that data. And when you are constantly under attack and trying to juggle 10 different IT priorities, it’s becoming an easier thing to go with the cloud and have that discussion,” Thompson explained.

Outsourcing data storage to the cloud frees up IT staff for higher priority needs

With ever rising lists of duties for healthcare IT departments, Thompson said outsourcing to the cloud helps free them up to do these things. She said it does not mean hospital IT departments are obsolete or people will lose their jobs.

“They can refocus on higher priority tasks that can greater serve the organization," Thompson said.