With increasing numbers of cloud-based tools and services — Amazon Cloud Player, Dropbox, Google Drive, and more — such storage may soon come to healthcare. Joy Pritts, the chief privacy officer at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at the US Department of Health and Human Services told a panel that "the switch to cloud is inevitable" for electronic medical records, reports Science Progress.
Such a switch, Science Progress adds, is supposed to save money while also enabling large-scale data analytics. However, Security and privacy remain challenges, like protecting data from hackers or lost devices, it adds. Further, laws governing cloud computing and electronic medical record storage are out of date. "The technology, the movement, and the practices are way ahead of the policy," Pritt added.