Hospitals and clinics are now looking at migrating from the traditional locally hosted model to the cloud. The reasons are primarily elasticity and savings in cost with the Hospital Management System today being seen as a mission critical application. In fact with improved connectivity, faster processing speeds, the ubiquity of mobile devices and other technological advances it is more appealing for healthcare providers to consider the subscription based SaaS model.
Of the 400 centers that use Insta HMS, about 30-40% is hosted on the cloud and the rest still adopt the application to be hosted on site locally. We believe that this model will see an inversion in less that 5 years to come.
Insta HMS being an AWS technology partner sees various advantages with the cloud model, the primary one being elasticity and savings in cost. Elasticity provides the flexibility of horizontal scaling or spinning of Application servers based on the need. The cost savings is substantial considering that you pay only based on use and need not reserve capacity.
Other reasons to consider migrating to the cloud:
- Public / Private Cloud: Should you go for hosting the application on a public cloud such as AWS or use a data-center that is available within your region. Don’t forget that AWS also provides what is called a VPC or a Virtual Private Cloud to ensure that the instance is logically isolated from other networks and provides Virtual Private connectivity.
- Multi-Tenancy: Are you using an application that supports multi-tenancy? Architecting a legacy single tenant application to be multi-tenant is easier said than done so ensure that the application is multi-tenant. Mutli-Tenant applications optimize cost of maintenance.
- Multiple Applications to juggle with - Save costs! - Today a health care provider doesn’t just require a single application enterprise wide such as say an HIS. There would be a requirement to have a Business/Health Analytics application, HRM, CRM, Financial Accounting, Payroll, Modality specific applications, etc, which may require tight integration across these applications. Hosting all of these applications on-site is an expensive and rigid affair. The costs for licensed versions of databases or Operating Systems can go through the roof. The savings in the op-ex model over the cap-ex is significant and so is the cost of replacement of one SaaS based application to another.
