[...] Here's a telling statistic: Even as more and more hospitals are subscribing to cloud computing services, 56 percent of CIOs said it is very difficult to explain the Capital Expenditure or Operational Expenditure ins-and-outs when vying for IT budgets and approvals.
That's according to data that Black Book managing partner Doug Brown pulled from research the firm compiled for its pending 2018 Health IT Trends report.
But guess what's coming, and quickly. Black Book found that "85 percent of hospital managers in facilities under 200 beds are paring back or freezing new IT CapEx investments in 2018, opting instead wherever possible to fund projects from the OpEx budget."
Wait, there's more. "57 percent of large hospitals over 200 beds are also pairing back or freezing IT CapEx investments in 2018," Brown added.
Analyst house IDC, for its part, projected that spending on cloud computing, including services as well as cloud-enabling hardware and software, will more than double to $530 billion by 2021.
This convergence of predictions means two things: cloud services, which frequently fall under that operational expenditure budget, are likely to become considerably more attractive than purchasing software upfront, and smart CIOs will cozy up to their CFOs to better understand CapEx vs. OpEx in practice.
More than just EHRs
Electronic health records get considerable attention in the realm of hospital IT shops but they are not the only technologies ripe for moving into the cloud.
SCL Health in Broomfield, Colorado, moved to cloud-based ShareFile, co-located its data center and has several software-as-a-service programs in action, according to CIO Dave Pecoraro.
"One of the benefits is capital avoidance. We're being able to thin down our client. So from a security standpoint we're not putting laptops out there with spinning drives and having to encrypt them," Pecoraro said. "We're moving toward more toward a Chromebook environment. Going from a $1200 laptop to a $300 Chromebook is a significant capital avoidance."
Tapping into Citrix tools and ShareFile enables Pecoraro to essentially equip users with out-of-the-box hardware devices. All they have to do is log-in with their credentials and enter their persona via that device. The setup also means SCL Health avoids the typical three or four year replacement cycle for laptops and PCs.
"There's more than 8,000 laptops in our organization, and in the past they all had to be touched, and we had to put an image on them and encryption on the hard drive," Pecoraro said. "That saves a lot of money and time. We've calculated somewhere on the order of three or four million dollars in savings, just on labor and capital avoidance."
Cloud: Where IT and finance get along
Some hospitals IT shops are already operating in conjunction with the finance team.
[...] Intermountain CFO Bert Zimmerli agreed that hospitals should educate themselves thoroughly on the strategic issues and work with cloud partners who are the best at what they do.
Zimmerli also suggested answering two key questions from the onset: can we be more efficient by moving into the cloud and can we use scale where scale matters?
"Do I think most things are going to migrate to the cloud? Absolutely I do," Zimmerli said. "If the cloud plays a strategic role we drive toward it on that basis."
St. Luke's University Health Network considered the cloud strategic when it co-located servers in a hosted datacenter in 2009, according to CIO Chad Brisendine.
Brisendine said that St. Luke's evaluated the total cost of ownership and CapEx vs. OpEx realities of maintaining its own servers against subscribing to a cloud service for that functionality.
"Our move was strategic so that IT doesn't have to get in the business of managing data centers. We moved 9 years ago to a colocation thinking that we would eventually move to the cloud," Brisendine explained. "Same decision to move to co-lo -- we didn't want to be in the power and cooling business anymore -- and now 9 years later we don't want to be in the server and storage business."
Source: Healthcare IT News (View full article)
Posted by Dan Corcoran on January 11, 2018 08:17 AM
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