The story at a glance
- What should you look for a cloud-based cardiology imaging solution? Simplicity, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility.
- Five critical checkpoints to consider in a cardiology SaaS solution vendor: predictable pricing, cybersecurity assurance, contractual SLAs, zero-downtime upgrades, and multi-region deployments.
- Start your cloud journey with practical, low-risk steps. A hybrid-cloud model allows you to begin your migration at your pace so you don’t need to commit to a full-sale migration from the jump.
Charting a course to the cloud for cardiology
Moving to the cloud can feel like a major undertaking. Many healthcare organizations have an imaging cloud strategy, but defining what success looks like and how to achieve it can be a challenge. What does a successful cloud migration journey – for both cardiology care teams and IT teams – look like? How do you measure that success? The answer lies in simplicity, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and accessibility.
This post will explore the key benefits and strategies for transitioning your cardiology solutions to the cloud. We'll outline what to look for in a cloud partner, discuss our unique approach to creating a cloud-based environment for cardiology imaging, and provide practical steps your organization can take today to begin your journey with confidence.
Defining what you want from a cloud-based cardiology solution
When considering a move to the cloud, it helps to think about the services you use in your daily life, like managing family photos. You expect a simple, reliable, and cost-effective way to upload, access, and share your files without worrying about storage limits or security. These same expectations apply to cardiology imaging.
- Simplicity: Your IT team is busy enough without having to get bogged down in managing storage migrations or server patches. Your cloud solution should handle this infrastructure management, ensuring your system is always up-to-date and running on the latest version without weekend-long upgrades.
- Reliability: You need a system that is always on and secure. A reliable cardiology software as a service (SaaS) cloud vendor minimizes your exposure to cybersecurity risks and guarantees high availability, reducing errors and system failures.
- Cost-effectiveness: Cloud adoption should offer a quick return on investment. Predictable costs without surprise fees are essential. Your payments should align with your usage, allowing you to scale while also saving on costs that would be wasted on an all-or-nothing platform.
- Accessibility: Secure access from any device, anywhere, without requiring a VPN should be a given with any cloud-based imaging solution. This flexibility is essential for your team to deliver care efficiently, whether they are in the hospital or working remotely.
5 checkpoints for choosing the right cloud partner
Transitioning to a SaaS model changes the relationship with your vendor. You are handing over significant responsibility of how your cardiology images are stored and accessible to physicians, which requires a new level of trust and partnership. Evaluating a vendor for a SaaS solution involves different criteria than a traditional perpetual license purchase.
Here are five critical checkpoints you should consider when evaluating a potential cloud partner:
- Predictable pricing: A good partner offers a fixed, predictable price that includes infrastructure costs. This incentivizes the vendor to optimize and reduce infrastructure expenses over time, which benefits you. Avoid models where costs fluctuate unpredictably with usage.
- Cybersecurity assurance: Look for certifications like SOC 2 reports and HITRUST. These frameworks ensure the vendor is following best technology and process management practices to protect your data.
- Contractual SLAs: Service Level Agreements (SLAs) should be clearly defined and contractually committed to. These should cover not just uptime (aiming for 99.99% or "four nines") but also performance metrics like image retrieval times. The agreement should also include penalties for failing to meet these SLAs.
- Zero-downtime upgrades: A vendor that requires downtime for upgrades is not giving you the full value of a cloud-based environment. Any vendor with a worthwhile cloud solution should be able to perform upgrades with zero downtime, ensuring continuous service.
- Multi-region deployment: To achieve high availability and ensure a robust disaster recovery strategy, the vendor should use a multi-region deployment. This ensures that if one data center experiences an issue, your service can failover to another region seamlessly, protecting you from any disruptions.
Start your cloud journey with practical, low-risk steps
One of the most important considerations to make for a cloud vendor is determining that they provide a hybrid architecture that allows you to explore the cloud at your own pace without committing to a full-scale migration from day one. In other words, letting you keep your on-premise system running while testing and adopting cloud functionalities.
Here are a few scenarios to consider for why this is important:
- Risk-free evaluation: Activate a cloud system that syncs with your on-premise environment. Your team can test workflows with real, live data, building confidence and surfacing any potential issues early in the process.
- Enable remote reading: Use the cloud to provide remote cardiologists with fast, secure access to data. By connecting directly to the cloud, they can bypass VPNs and enjoy a superior performance experience, while your primary workflows remain on-premise.
- Pilot with a tech-savvy group: Choose a small group of cardiologists to start using the cloud system for their daily work. They can rely on the on-premise system as a backup, allowing them to switch back and forth as needed. As these physicians gain confidence, consider expanding the group to solicit even more feedback – and ultimately, buy-in from the care teams who will be using and benefiting from it.
The move to a fully managed cloud solution is a necessity for healthcare organizations facing shrinking IT budgets and mounting technical demands. But by taking a thoughtful, phased approach, like how we’ve outlined above, you can de-risk the transition and start realizing the benefits of the cloud for your cardiology imaging practice, care teams, and patients sooner than you think.