Will Cloud-Based Medical Imaging Improve Healthcare While Protecting Patient Privacy?
Medical imaging software has traditionally been located on local servers and workstations within a healthcare organization.
However, there is a growing trend towards adopting cloud-based solutions that promise greater accessibility, collaboration, analytics, and more. But is the future of medical imaging really in the cloud?
While cloud-based imaging software offers noteworthy benefits, privacy and security concerns still stand in the way for many healthcare providers.
Below we dive into the key considerations around shifting medical imaging to the cloud.
The Promise of Cloud-Based Medical Imaging
Cloud hosting for medical imaging aims to improve clinician collaboration, workflow efficiency, analytics, and overall quality of care. Some of the touted benefits include:
Access Images Anywhere: Cloud platforms allow instant access to medical images across multiple devices and locations. Clinicians can pull up and analyze scans wherever they are.
Real-Time Collaboration: Cloud-based viewers support seamless collaboration between radiologists and physicians. Annotations and markings can be viewed in real time.
Enhanced Analytics: Cloud platforms aggregate data from images across healthcare networks, powering analytics on pathology trends.
Scalability: Cloud infrastructure scales elastically to handle growing imaging volumes cost-effectively.
Disaster Recovery: Cloud backups ensure images remain available if local servers or PACS systems fail.
Cloud-based medical image sharing aims to enhance clinician collaboration and workflow efficiency.
Here is the data formatted as a Markdown table:
The volume of medical images stored in the cloud is expected to more than double by 2025.
These capabilities around accessibility, analytics, and resilience are compelling reasons for healthcare IT teams to consider shifting imaging platforms to the cloud.
Privacy and Security Concerns with Medical Imaging in the Cloud
However, along with the benefits come notable privacy and security risks inherent in placing protected health information (PHI) in the public cloud.
Medical images contain highly sensitive patient data that cloud platforms could expose in these potential weak spots:
Misconfigured Storage: Unencrypted cloud buckets allowed open access.
Compromised Credentials: Breaches via stolen login credentials.
Vulnerable Data Transfer: Unencrypted data transfers over the public internet.
Shared Responsibility Failures: Cloud provider secures infrastructure, but healthcare org fails to properly configure security controls.
Insider Threats: Cloud admin staff abusing access rights to view or steal records.
Ransomware Attacks: Malware locking access to patient images.
Regulatory Non-Compliance: The platform lacks proper safeguards and auditing required by HIPAA, etc.
31% of healthcare data breaches are associated with misconfigured cloud servers and storage.
Any breach of medical images would be catastrophic for patient privacy. It could also lead to steep HIPAA fines and reputational damage for the healthcare provider.
Despite the benefits, data security concerns present a formidable barrier to adopting cloud-based medical imaging platforms. Patient privacy must come first.
Balancing Priorities: The Hybrid Approach
For many healthcare IT teams, the solution lies in adopting a hybrid approach to medical imaging:
Maintain physical imaging servers and PACS on-premises.
Extend certain workflows, collaboration, analytics, and viewer capabilities to a cloud platform.
Take advantage of cloud scalability for disaster recovery backups.
Employ multi-factor authentication, role-based access controls, and audit logging to lock down cloud access.
Encrypt all network connections and data transfers between cloud and on-prem.
Utilize network security tools to guard against threats.
This balances the benefits of increased accessibility and efficiency while keeping sensitive data on existing secured servers.
Analytics can still occur against anonymized metadata. Images stay where they have the highest level of control and protection.
The hybrid model for medical imaging aims to realize the collaboration and workflow gains of cloud software while mitigating data security exposures.
For large hospital networks, this gradual and guarded shift allows clinical teams to utilize cloud capabilities without jumping entirely into the public cloud.
Healthcare IT must carefully weigh both sides of the equation. But with strong guardrails in place, cloud-based medical imaging can balance improved patient care with privacy. The journey should start with small steps.
Cloud-based medical imaging platforms promise more collaboration and efficiency but raise valid security issues around protected health data.
