By C-DEP Team
In April 2013, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFA) India released Electronic Health Record (EHR) standard to encourage electronic health information exchange among healthcare stakeholders. In addition, MoHFA expressed a need to find a suitable technology for EHR. The demographic details of patients, vital signs, problems, medications, past medical histories, immunizations, progress-notes, laboratory data, and radiology reports are some of the information included in the EHR,
Therefore, study aimed at obtaining insights into the desirability, feasibility, and concern to deploy cloud computing as a technology solution for EHR. The study involved a focus group discussion with sixteen experts who exchanged 76 emails to gather their insights. The group discussion was moderated to keep it aligned with the goal of the research. The group discussed the topics for a period of one month starting from 17 May to 5 June 2012.
The results of this study suggest that the use of cloud computing for the EHR is likely to emerge in the future. However, given the current ICT infrastructure and healthcare system of India, several concerns were raised. Therefore, the superiority of cloud computing over other technologies needs to be assured, and stakeholder’s concerns should be satisfactorily answered.
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