Are Cloud-Based Health Record Banks Better Than HIEs?

This week a group of researchers published an opinion in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that cloud-based record banks are a better way to share patient health data than HIEs. I think their view is interesting and sensible, and so here’s a short recap.

The authors argue that cloud-based health record banks are a more logical way to share such data than HIEs, reports MedCityNews. After all, as they note, interoperability challenges make it “inefficient” to share patient data, as every organization has to be able to communicate with every other organization where a patient has been treated.

But cloud-based health record banks wouldn’t pose the same challenges, they note.  These record banks would be more scalable and easier for end institutions to use, according to the authors.  Though local providers could keep copies of a patient’s health record, the electronic health record would be stored in a cloud-based bank in the patient’s community, they say.  When patients moved, their records would travel to a different community health data bank.

This approach isn’t just a theoretical discussion. It’s backed by a group called the Health Record Banking Alliance, which was founded by one of the article’s authors, Dr. William Yasnoff, MD, PhD, FACMI, former senior advisor for the National Health Information Infrastructure. The group has developed white papers outlining a proposed architecture and a business model for community health record banking.

My take on all of this is that the cloud-based community health record bank is a very worthwhile idea. After all, in theory it can greatly reduce the amount of infrastructure build out and interoperability issues providers face in connecting to HIEs.

That being said, the HIE concept is firmly planted in the industry’s mind, and despite all of the issues involved in building out HIE networks, I don’t see providers changing gears to embrace a completely new model. What about you?

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

3 Comments

  • […] A group of researchers recently published an opinion in the Journal of the American Medical Association regarding cloud-based health records versus HIEs. The verdict? They feel that the cloud-based health records might be a better way of sharing health records. What they had to say was rather interesting, so don’t miss the recap of it over at EMR and EHR. […]

  • I manage the implementation of a HIE within an organization with over 100,000 employees and over 5000 applications to be integrated. This gives me a good insight in HIE implementation issues. As we need to scale up, we are currently moving to virtualization and cloud implementation of our various services within the HIE.
    I personally see cloud as a technical solution to the challenge of continuous scalability and dynamic load balancing, not a way to simplify collaboration ( the business requirement behind a HIE, the core requirement for a working E.H.R.).
    For collaboration, the participants need to agree on standards and common governance – same type of challenge when implementing a HIE or a Cloud based E.H.R. bank that all will have to share.
    Again, cloud technology is good, virtualization is good, but when implementing a collaborative capability on whatever the technology of the day might be,one would still have to have multiple applications and a HIE like functionality (in the cloud or not) and, as such, face the same challenges.
    And by the way, we are integrating with Microsoft Vault and that exercise did not remove or show promise of simplification either.
    Unless one decides to go with one vendor, one platform for everything at the state, province, nation level, whatever the technology might be, the challenge stays with the governance of the many contributors (governance includes standards).

  • Great article….I have heard of a company called Evolve Exchange that is doing some great work with interoperability solutions for EMR’s. I believe their website is evolvecloudexchange.com

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