e-Health Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges

Eman AbuKhousa, Nader Mohamed and Jameela Al-Jaroodi
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Eman AbuKhousa: Faculty of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), P.O. Box 17551, Al Ain, UAE
Nader Mohamed: Faculty of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), P.O. Box 17551, Al Ain, UAE
Jameela Al-Jaroodi: Faculty of Information Technology, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), P.O. Box 17551, Al Ain, UAE

Future Internet, 2012, vol. 4, issue 3, 1-25

Abstract: As the costs of healthcare services rise and healthcare professionals are becoming scarce and hard to find, it is imminent that healthcare organizations consider adopting health information technology (HIT) systems. HIT allows health organizations to streamline many of their processes and provide services in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. The latest technological trends such as Cloud Computing (CC) provide a strong infrastructure and offer a true enabler for HIT services over the Internet. This can be achieved on a pay-as-you-use model of the “e-Health Cloud” to help the healthcare industry cope with current and future demands yet keeping their costs to a minimum. Despite its great potential, HIT as a CC model has not been addressed extensively in the literature. There are no apparent frameworks which clearly encompass all viable schemes and interrelationships between HIT and CC. Therefore, analyzing and comparing the effectiveness of such schemes is important. In this paper we introduce the concept of “e-Health Cloud” highlighting many of its constituents and proposing building an e-health environment and elucidating many of the challenges confronting the success of the e-Health Cloud. We will also discuss different possible solutions to address challenges such as security and privacy.

Keywords: health information technology; Cloud computing; e-Health Cloud; healthcare services; security; privacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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