Journey to the Cloud: Provider Considerations, Key Learnings and What’s Next – Whitepaper

Whitepaper written for Visage Imaging and Amazon Web Services (AWS) by Amy Thompson.

Since the pandemic, cloud has become a prominent theme of global radiology conferences, industry discussions and marketing from imaging IT vendors. From initial intrigue and industry deliberation on what cloud deployment actually is, the radiology IT market has taken strides to evaluate and in growing instances, deploy solutions, on the public cloud. Market conditions in the US have accelerated interest from healthcare providers. Health network mergers have created increasingly complex and disparate health networks, security risks are heightening, exemplified by several high-profile cyberattacks, and radiologists want increasing flexibility to read remotely.

For this paper, Signify Research conducted 6 primary interviews with US-based healthcare institutions, with participation from 14 prominent and experienced healthcare professionals in clinical, IT and C-suite positions. All the sampled providers have transitioned from on-premise implementations to public cloud deployment of their complete radiology IT solution (PACS) in the last few years. Throughout this paper, we’ll evaluate the journey these providers have undertaken, identify the common drivers and concerns around public cloud deployment and summarise the key learnings from their experiences. In doing so, this paper will offer clear guidance to providers that may be evaluating a cloud-deployment strategy for radiology IT.