Dell Aims Cloud Services At Health Care

as cloud computing technologies mature they will become more vertically focused

Dell's latest cloud computing services offerings are designed for hospitals and physician practices and represent a four-pronged, targeted vertical approach to the cloud.

Dell is delivering new cloud-based services to simplify secure information access and sharing for physicians and hospitals and improve health-care efficiency from the point of care to the data center and business office, Dell said.

"We are providing innovative solutions through innovative delivery. The cloud provides the infrastructure that makes solutions-as-a-service possible so that health-care organizations and care providers focus on how to best use patient information, not how to manage it," Berk Smith, vice president of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences Services, said in a statement.

First up is an archiving-as-a-service play. Dell's Unified Clinical Archiving (UCA) solution is now offered through the private cloud. The service comes on the heels of Dell's acquisition of medical cloud storage and archiving player InSite One. The service can consolidate and move archiving to the cloud with a per-study pricing plan to help hospitals reduce storage and retention costs while freeing up resources.

Next is analytics and reporting-as-a-service, a tag-team play with Microsoft in which Dell and the software giant built a subscription-based analytics, informatics and business intelligence offering to give community hospitals a consolidated view of patient information.

The reporting-as-a-service offering ties together the Microsoft Amalga health intelligence platform with Dell's cloud infrastructure and its informatics, analytics and consulting plays. Dell's solution gives hospitals a Quality Indicator System (QIS) to capture data as patients enter the hospital, determine which quality measures may apply to the patient and enable the hospital to track and measure compliance to those quality metrics during a patient's stay. It also eases quality-of-care reporting for Medicare and Medicaid and marks the first time Microsoft Amalga will be available as a service.

The health-care cloud onslaught continued with a new platform-as-a-service dubbed Dell MSite which gives hospitals using MEDITECH access to Health Care Information Systems (HCIS) software through the cloud. Using MSite, Dell can host MEDITECH applications in a private cloud with technical and applications support, maintenance and disaster recovery. MSite removes the capital expenses of MEDITECH. Additionally, to ease access to clinical information at the point of care Dell is working with MEDITECH to develop a virtual-desktop solution for MEDITECH hospitals known as Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) for MEDITECH.

Lastly, Dell said it is enhancing its EMR-as-a-Service, which hosts EMR and practice management software for more than 40,000 clinicians.

"With the cloud, Dell is putting the emphasis where it should be for medical professionals and health-care organizations -- using information to improve care for patients and using informatics to improve the way we care for them," Jamie Coffin, Ph.D., vice president and general manager of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, said in a statement.