The Evolution of Health Care IT: Are Current U.S. Privacy Policies Ready for the Clouds?

The U.S. healthcare industry has been given anew mandate to expand the use of health information technology to provide better care and to help reduce costs. Equally, cloud computing is poised to become the fifth utility delivering economies of scale and cost benefits that are difficult for businesses to ignore. The utilization of cloud services for the storage and exchange of personal health information is growing with the use of electronic health records and health information exchanges. Yet policies and regulatory mandates are still lagging and the potential for the loss of personal information is expanding exponentially. HIPAA/HITECH currently only provides a baseline of protection for personal health information while various IT security frameworks help to standardize the protection and security of personal information as well as the security of cloud services. As the technology matures further and the healthcare industry embraces data and privacy governance programs, the chance for a successful health IT transformation with the use of the cloud significantly increase.