Level 3 Study Reveals Top Three Cloud Drivers

A new Level 3 Communications study, conducted by HIMSS Analytics and designed to understand cloud use, trends, and preferred vendors among healthcare organizations, was recently released. The 2016 Cloud Survey is a blinded, web-based quantitative study that includes perspective from more than 100 IT decision makers at medium to large-sized hospital systems and hospital corporate offices across the United States.

“Healthcare organizations are tapping into cloud-based solutions to support the transformation to value-based care, from big data analytics that can improve patient outcomes to back office applications, email and record back-up,” says Brian Hoekelman, VP Business and Cloud Ecosystem Development for Level 3. “In our conversations with customers, we also find that security is always top of mind. The network plays a vital role in fulfilling that need, which is why 2,500 healthcare organizations, including eight of the nation’s ten largest hospital systems and payer organizations, trust Level 3 to deploy secure, scalable and high performing communications infrastructure.”

Key Findings:

• The top three cloud adoption motivators are cost savings, more robust disaster recovery solutions and the need for scalable platforms to support internal requirements.
• The likelihood of healthcare providers planning to adopt cloud-based solutions for key use cases such as back office solutions, business continuity and disaster recovery, archiving data, health information exchange and HR or financial applications increased 65% in the last two years.
• The most frequently cited cloud implementations address the ability to host patient empowerment tools (73%), the need for compute cycles capable of executing big data analytics (59%) and the need to satisfy business requirements like picture archiving and communication system (PACS) storage (55%), indicating providers are employing cloud solutions for personal health information (PHI) and non-PHI applications, alike.
• The majority of respondents (77%) stated they involve their network provider early in cloud strategy discussions.
• Cloud service providers Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google are all recognized among healthcare providers as industry leaders.

“Many healthcare organizations are using cloud solutions today, but this is only the beginning,” says Kyle Mumley, Advisory Solutions Group at HIMSS Analytics. “Previous HIMSS Analytics research shows that CapEx spending is on the decline while OpEx spending is increasing; this study supports those findings with 85% of participants indicating plans to use the cloud in 2016. The study also shows that the primary drivers for this shift are cost savings and disaster recovery initiatives.”