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healthcare it
cluded hot disaster recovery (DR)-type capability. Most vendors
allow for pricing that is dependent upon the needs of various user
groups. These various solutions can be mixed, creating a kind of hybrid
solution that can drive down costs. For us, this means our end
users — primarily clinicians with little time in front of the computer
for emailing — have a lower-cost hosting solution than our senior
management team, who are in front of the computer and on email
several hours each day, even though both have encryption, eDiscovery
and DR capabilities.
Anyone considering this path quickly learns that the options boil
down to this: Use Google, Office 365, or a vendor that hosts Exchange
on their servers — or a combination of more than one host.
Choices
We learned that Google will not sign a business associate agreement
(BAA). According to Google, like Verizon, they fall under a
clause in the legislation that excludes them. We must consult our
legal team, who is reviewing their explanation to see if we can safely
proceed with this option without a BAA.
We also discovered that Microsoft Office 365 is willing to sign a
BAA, and their pricing is comparable to Google’s. They host only
on servers in the U.S., and many of our users are very familiar with
Exchange. Like Google, this is a multi-tenant environment.
At least one vendor can host the exchange on dedicated servers,
with the DR and backup on virtual servers. In the past, DR and
backup resulted in a cost of 100% of production. Now this option is
roughly 30-40% of production cost.
At least two vendors said they could host email overseas, but only
on servers in the European Union (EU) because the EU has security
policies as high as or higher than the U.S. We are in the process of
deciding if this is a risk we can tolerate, and at what cost saving, if any.
Forging Ahead
We have more to learn, and are still communicating with several vendors
to clarify their services. Although it’s the middle of July and we
haven’t even chosen a vendor, we expect to have a decision made and
have our solution in production by the middle of August — by the time
most of us are reading this article. That’s the power of the cloud.
Is outsourcing dialysis
right for your hospital?
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CLINICAL DIFFERENTIATION
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of renal patient care.
PROVEN COST SAVINGS
The average hospital saves 34%
per dialysis treatment with DaVita. 1
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© 2012 DaVita Inc. All rights reserved. 06105-01-MKEV
1
Reflective of results at hospitals that use DaVita for their acute dialysis services and Patient Pathways LLC, a subsidiary of DaVita, for their discharge services. Patient Pathways is a provider-agnostic
discharge planning service that provides hospitals an unbiased liaison that specializes in complex ESRD outpatient placements. Hospital Services Group data as of January 2012.
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