I think security issues in cases like banking were before credit cards and internet banking and the internet itself. In past times, you could loose your wallet or it can be snatched from your back pocket when you are out of the bank heading to hand the money to some shop keeper. Credit cards and internet banking have eliminated such risk, however new risks popped out such as the stolen passwords problem. Similarly, health care based on cloud computing could bring out new security risks, which might even endanger lives in certain circumstances, but at very much more efficiency and many new advantages as outlined by colleagues above. The claim that such risks will stop cloud computing health-care is similar to the claim that using an ambulance to transfer patients -fast- to hospitals is risky because any one ambulance can have an accident on its way to the hospital. Thanks. @AlDmour.

Yes. I think medical cloud computing would definitely become a reality because advantages override disadvantages in a big way.

Yes. The security and reliability of cloud computing is an issue but I think in next few years these would be addressed. If you are interested probably researching solutions for security and reliability would be a good thing to do.

Another advantage of medical cloud computing is it also enable medical/health informatics through the bid data analytics.

Yes, it becomes reality, it leads to better medicine (medical devices in cloud, medical records, imaging, medical office...)!Have a look!

My most important doubt is the security of the patients data. I don´t believe in the dilligence of the central data storage. Please remember the millions of passwords stolen in the last months. My patient data are my data and not the data of the world!

I'm sure it will be reality soon as many as of our dreams and that moment will be for sure will take the medicine for new horizon

Hanno, you just completely confirmed my research paper "Assessment of Cloud-based Health Monitoring using Homomorphic Encryption" , which describes a system for the cloud to compute on the data WITHOUT ACTUALLY SEEING THE DATA. That's the property of Homomorphic Encryption :)

Thank you

Tolga :)

I think it will depend on what is being transferred to the cloud. I think that administrative applications such as billing can be moved to the cloud (if Target can loose thousands of credit cards so can hospitals, no biggie :-). Patient medical records are another matter since it depends on the reliability of the lines to connect to the data center to transfer the data(it is unrealistic to think that such critical infrastructure can be completely outsources since you will need local storage in case of interruption in line communications or other infrastructure service. This is where a real cost/benefit analysis will come in).

As for more critical operations, my take is that we are still in the infancy of what could become bio hacking(such as the compromise made on the insulin pump) which makes outsourcing other more critical services over the wire/wireless/cloud a real attack vector.

Dear Tolga,

could you post this paper please?

Hanno, this paper is on my RG Home Page:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257066305_Assessment_of_Cloud-based_Health_Monitoring_using_Homomorphic_Encryption

Conference Paper Assessment of Cloud-based Health Monitoring using Homomorphi...

Putting sensitive information into third party, competitive/accountable hands and out of the hands of the service industry to focus better on their respective expertise rather than 'big data' does a service all around, economically, healthcare-wise, etc., and competitively providing the best possible privacy protection, even over the present at least as vulnerable system of patient/healthcare inaccessible medical records.

Our psychiatric hospital for prisoners had a system of daily capturing the data at the point of care into a secured database transmitted monthly without any patient identifiers and, never seeing the categories, using delimited text to a third party company (NRI Inc.), which generated back comparative (historical, along with other similar facilities across the country) analysis reports for QI decisions and toward acquiring and maintaining our annual Joint Committee (JCAHO) accreditation.

Also, just as one can now be instantly alerted electronically to each and every bank account transaction at a (HOLD and REVERSIBLE) point of sale, so too for any account activity, healthcare or otherwise. Long before the Target, etc., fiascos, I simply set up my personal accounts to do this by merely setting threshold notifications to $0. No app required; it should be the default. Then organizations can hold the account holder responsible and not fear being toppled and likely bailed out by the public one way or another versus robust growth (such as in infrastructures, of course healthcare, education, and other industries, and the middle class, etc.) all around.

I think security issues in cases like banking were before credit cards and internet banking and the internet itself. In past times, you could loose your wallet or it can be snatched from your back pocket when you are out of the bank heading to hand the money to some shop keeper. Credit cards and internet banking have eliminated such risk, however new risks popped out such as the stolen passwords problem. Similarly, health care based on cloud computing could bring out new security risks, which might even endanger lives in certain circumstances, but at very much more efficiency and many new advantages as outlined by colleagues above. The claim that such risks will stop cloud computing health-care is similar to the claim that using an ambulance to transfer patients -fast- to hospitals is risky because any one ambulance can have an accident on its way to the hospital. Thanks. @AlDmour.

Answer to this question is "YES".

Nowadays "Cloud" is everywhere!

Medical Nanobots Will Connect Brain to Cloud Computing – Ray Kurzweil .In the coming decades, a radical upgrading of our body’s physical and mental systems, already underway, will use nanobots to augment and ultimately replace our organs. We already know how to prevent most degenerative disease through nutrition and supplementation; this will be a bridge to the emerging biotechnology revolution, which in turn will be a bridge to the nanotechnology revolution. By 2030, reverse-engineering of the human brain will have been completed and nonbiological intelligence will merge with our biological brains.http://nanobrainimplant.com/2014/02/08/medical-nanobots-will-connect-brain-to-cloud-computing-ray-kurzweil/

Dear Tolga,

I just studied your paper. I´m not sure, if the big data packets for medical picture files (CT, MR, NUC, US...) really can be encrypted and decrypted in a propriate time. Do you have some ideas or estimations?

Yes. One of the biggest disadvantages of the type of encryption we are using (homomorphic encryption) is that , it is really slow. However, for slow varying signals, like ECG signals (with a sampling rate of under 1 KSPS), it is fast enough. A big portion of my research centers around making it fast using hardware accelerators with GPUs or FPGAs.

Dear Tolga,

Technology-cally very feasible, and you know better than me about this. :)

The real war know actually happen in law, such as

- who shall regulate that big amount of data / authority?

- And, on whom authority of each medical record resides? :)

Of course medical cloud computing has the advantages and disadvantages of any other kind of cloud computing. Regarding the cost and the rapidly change in OS and software architecture, probably it could be an improvement, but I have some questions about the way that you can collaborate with workers from Google, Microsoft and other giant software corporations. My limited experience has taught me that those companies are strictly profit oriented, so every collaboration will be a minimal for you - maximal for them. Take for example the Google AdWords and compare it with the Google AdSense: you have to pay >10 euros/day while you take

@Demetris, I share your worries.

Thanks you all for the high-level replies.

I work on the Cloud Computing research field, on infrastructure monitoring and autonomous systems, but we have some MedCloud related projects.

Currently they run under our managed private Cloud, which is already an advantage related to the traditional datacenter. There we can perform CPU-intensive calculus using MapReduce jobs over Hadoop clusters giving a clear advantage to normal job processing.

But I see the focus here is for a pay-as-you-go hybrid scenario, which is in the wild Internet world.

There are already several works and in production environments for Medical Storage in the Cloud, for PACS, exam results collection and so on, I have seen solutions around mostly with AWS and Microsoft Azure.

AWS for example has a HIPAA compliant whitepaper. https://d36cz9buwru1tt.cloudfront.net/AWS_HIPAA_Whitepaper_Final.pdf

There are other articles with Medical processing

For medical data exchange I would not go with nothing less than a VPN channel building a hybrid Cloud contacting very specific servers, with SSL (and fixed OpenSSL clients/servers) encryption and additionally disk encryption.

@Tolga, I want to read your paper as this topic interests me a lot. Thx.

http://www.kellyocg.com/uploadedFiles/Content/Knowledge/Ebooks/Medical%20Devices%20Begin%20to%20Drift%20Into%20Cloud.pdf

You are right, driving for profit can replace all the humanistic ideas of this progressive method.

Every technology has some advantage and some disadvantage. We cannot fully remove all of its disadvantages but we can reduce them.

Hacking is one of the disadvantage of this technology but apart from that, if we will pay attention to its positive side, we will find it more useful and beneficial and can say that it will be a reality in coming future.

Regards,

Nitish.

To sum up: medical cloud computing may be difficult due to many various factors:

- legal (personal data sets shouldnt be e.g. stored abrod -regulations depend on country, moreover how to execute right to complete data removal?),

- ethical (sold IDs),

- data security.

Careful analysis of pros and cons should be provided, since no one option is predominant.

Dear Tolga Soyata, Thank you very much for asking this very important question.

In my opinion, it is good that there was a discussion in the question of this query.

This is a very interesting and scientifically important topic.

Because the topic is very important so I still read the answers, I follow the interesting discussion.

Question:

Will medical cloud computing ever be a reality ?

this is a very important issue that requires scientific research.

I answer an interesting question:

Yes, cloud computing and other technologies Industry 4.0. it concerns many areas that are developing and will develop in the future. Progress in medicine is determined by the development of diseases, but also by technological and technological advances. Cloud computing applies to many technological sectors of today's advanced knowledge-based economies that are already entering the technological revolution known as Industry 4.0.

I would like to add to the above answer the following question confirming my answer: One of the areas that are indicated by futurologists for development in the future are techniques called Medical Intelligence. In addition, due to the progressive aging of societies in developed countries it will be necessary to develop also robotization, automation, computerization, implementation into many areas of human functioning and many branches of modern economies, also artificial itelligence technology, analysis of large data sets in the cloud computing, data collected in Big Data database systems, machine learning, Internet of Things, etc. I invite you to the discussion

Following

Following answers.

How Cloud Solutions Are Impacting Healthcare

Adopting cloud computing solutions can make healthcare operations even more convenient and cost effective.

The cloud offers on-demand computing by using the latest in technology to deploy, access, and use networked information, applications, and resources. Unfortunately, it also has a complex infrastructure that may be challenging to understand.

In most cases, end users are sure to find that cloud computing is the best choice for their healthcare business, as it’s often less costly than having multiple computers in various medical rooms — each needing proper hardware, updated software, and network accessibility to upload, store, and retrieve patient or other medical data.

Healthcare IT solutions have offered many worthy benefits to the industry already. And now that enhanced security and safeguards are in place for cloud computing solutions, carriers, and service providers, healthcare organizations can rest easy knowing they’re protected from potential loss of control over certain sensitive patient data.

With IT spending on the rise, cloud-based electronic health records (EHRs) is beginning to have an impact on the health industry...

Lack of security and privacy are the two primary concerns healthcare providers face when choosing a cloud solution ...

https://www.innovativearchitects.com/KnowledgeCenter/industry-specific/healthcare-and-cloud-computing.aspx