| | FEBRUARY 20189CIOReviewprevent illness from occurring later on. Moving forward, this model of leveraging virtualization will become even more important for healthcare organizations as the industry moves towards using machine learning, advanced analytics and healthcare informatics to develop better models for intervention. Atrius Health has built our own private Atrius Cloud and uses public cloud services when needed to provide more unique offerings to the organization. As the IT industry shifts from using purely localized virtualization on physical servers into cloud and hybrid-cloud technology, organizations must develop their own unique approaches to navigate this shift. Though the cloud can be useful for storing, exchanging and sending information, company IT professionals lose a degree of control over their ability to fine-tune applications once they go into a cloud. This makes it more difficult to analyze performance and/or data integrity issues with applications in the cloud. There are recent examples of well-respected companies in which failures occurred, taking critical systems offline for weeks, leaving customers with no control or recourse other than to wait. It could happen to anyone, but limiting reliance on one solution--the proverbial "all eggs in one basket" approach--is fraught with hidden pitfalls. Another challenge organizations will face is the cost of implementing and leveraging this technology, a concern now amplified by the extreme consolidation of the technology industry as a whole. With fewer choices among technology vendors, businesses face rising costs in keeping their IT systems running efficiently along with forced upgrades in many cases. Additionally, software providers have taken advantage of the flexibility virtualization offers to build applications that require significantly higher levels of resources, despite the reality that virtualization is not free. Furthermore, the same vendors supplying local virtualization applications are driving the market shift to cloud virtualization, putting organizations in the difficult position of needing to purchase new technology.In the face of these challenges, it is important that businesses collaborate with their vendors to leverage and apply the technology in the way that best suits the businesses' needs. At Atrius Health, we actively work with our electronic medical record vendor to automate previously labor-intensive tasks, making it easier for our clinicians to navigate and access patient information. We have open lines of communication and respond collaboratively to incidents such as delays in viewing patient charts and medical records, and activities such as data replication, business continuity planning and backup. Trust in the partnership and a shared goal is critical. This level of partnership must extend beyond customers and vendors to relationships among the vendors themselves. For too long, software and hardware technologies have been siloed. It's crucial that these two development streams co-create together and mitigate obstacles to deploying new technologies before they reach customers. Developing added functionality for an EMR, radiology or business operations environment cannot be done in a vacuum because such advancements have ripple effects across a customer's enterprise, both in dollars as well as supportability and confidence that the systems will function properly. We saw this with a recently deployed application that required added resources to bring it to a nominally functional state. Our perception was that this application was developed in a silo by the vendor with little to no stress testing, and therefore they misrepresented their technology specifications. In this case, the cost of operating the application has doubled from a resources perspective and confidence in that software vendor has been lessened. Virtualization technology solves some problems, but the people behind the technology are doing the thinking. Constant and transparent collaboration is the catalyst for innovation and new ways to apply technology, benefitting business and the industry as a whole, and most importantly for healthcare: our patients. Though the cloud can be useful for storing, exchanging and sending information, company IT professionals lose a degree of control over their ability to fine-tune applications once they go into a cloudMichael K. Giannopoulos
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