Signify Premium Insight: Big Tech in Bed with Big EHR on the Cloud
Published: January 3, 2023
It is 2035. The last US hospital has finally migrated its EHR to the public cloud. It has been some digital transformation journey, spanning nearly two decades. In that time, hospitals have realised lower operating costs, lower total cost of ownership and the goal of seamless, system-wide information sharing. Big EHR vendors like Epic and Dedalus have answered customer needs. And Big Tech has played a central role in the transformation.
Rewind to 2023 and public cloud providers Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure stand, at last, on the cusp of cracking the hospital IT public cloud market. Their success to date has been mixed: only around 15% of US hospitals had fully migrated to public cloud as of end-2022. But recent EHR hosting agreements between Epic and Google Cloud (in the US), and Dedalus and AWS (in Europe) promise to accelerate migration.
However, on the notoriously slow-moving healthcare ship, and for many reasons, full migration will take more than a decade to achieve.