- What is cloud computing?
'Cloud computing' is a term used for provision of "software as a service" over the Internet.
This approach has the potential to deliver functionally rich software at undreamed of economies of scale. The giants of cloud computing are household names among us so
the concept is hardly new. Technology futurists predict the growth of so-called cloud computing well beyond
its origins in solutions for consumers and into "software as a service" models for business that will challenge the traditional client-server approach to business computing.
- Cloud computing in the health sector
In the information rich, time-poor and constantly evolving area of specialised medicine, there is no IT model more suitable than one constructed on the principles of
economies of scale and professional collaboration. An individual clinician's area of interest and colleagues with whom they would naturally collaborate can go well beyond a single hospital or medical practice and
often even beyond national borders.
This is why the traditional enterprise level view of health data management is not well suited to clincians who are leading practitioners and researchers in their field.
- EpiSoft in the cloud
EpiSoft is a cloud computing solution designed around the concept of a clinical community. A clinician can routinely use a secure partition of the EpiSoft system for the clinical management
of their own patients while at the same time contribute to a de-identified data pool to benchmark outcomes against a much larger cohort of patients. In contrast to solutions that attempt to integrate data
from numerous sources after the event, the clinical community is core to the EpiSoft solution and not constructed as an afterthought.
This means information capture and reporting is aligned and aggregated across any number of participating sites at the outset without the need to normalise, cleanse, map or move
data anywhere.
Stringent security and privacy safeguards are central to the EpiSoft technology and business model. These include:
- Partitioning of personal information within an organisation's area of the system
- Encryption applied at various levels of the application and to personal information stored in the database
- Storage of data in a secure data centre that is compliant with national standards for information security
- Location of the data centre in a jurisdiction with stringent privacy and health records management legislation
- Core functionality of EpiSoft
EpiSoft is a secure Internet system that supports the following clinical processes:
- Routine management of patients with a particular disease, condition or presenting problem
- Clinical audit (ad hoc or ongoing)
- Active disease or product registries
- Clinical research / clinical trials
- Post marketing surveillance
- Secure patient data capture
EpiSoft delivers a platform for consistent data capture and consistent reporting to clinicians who are at the forefront of their field, located anywhere in the world. A single platform
that at once supports routine clinical management as well as prospective research can drastically reduce the research life cycle between the research hypothesis and the results being published and disseminated
into an evidence-based software platform for the wider community.
It doesn't take a technology futurist to imagine what benefits the EpiSoft approach to information management will bring to people with debilitating conditions.
