Many providers have been hesitant to take on the task of converting from the paper-based medical record system to the electronic health record. Making the change can be time-consuming and costly. Also, physicians and staff may have a difficult time transitioning to a new way of collecting and handling patient information. However, the benefits highly outweigh the challenges.

Reduced Storage

In comparison to digital records, paper records require a substantial amount of space. Not only do providers have to keep information on file for the treatment of their patients but must keep those files on-hand due to health care regulations for at least 6 years.

Ease of Access

With a digital record, access is virtually unlimited. Physicians can have access to test results almost immediately. Multiple departments can add clinical information to the health record without having to locate or checkout a paper medical record chart.

Improved Accuracy

Medical errors in a paper-based medical record system can sometimes be related to incomplete documentation and illegible handwriting. Electronic systems come with features that make sure all information necessary for patient care is included on the form. Some EMR software packages have edits in place that require the user to add additional information as needed.

Reduced Costs

Although providers may have the initial costs of implementing an electronic medical record system, the overall costs are less than those associated with the paper record. Paper medical records have higher costs due to the necessity of more personnel to manage, access, file, and maintain paper charts.

Increased Risk Management

With all patient information in digital form, providers are able to track clinical issues more effectively allowing them to easily identify areas of risk. Processes can quickly and accurately be put in place in order to improve patient care.

By Joy Hicks, About.com Guide

Today, Dell today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SonicWALL, Inc., a leader in advanced network security and data protection. SonicWALL’s industry-leading Next-Generation Firewalls and Unified Threat Management (UTM) Firewalls complement Dell’s security solutions portfolio, enabling it to offer customers a broader range of enterprise offerings.

The demand for a comprehensive UTM solution is being driven by increasing customer concern about Cyber Security. IDC estimates that this space is projected to grow approximately 13 percent per year through 2015. This market continues to present opportunities for growth as customers in emerging markets are buying their first UTM solution and developed regions of the world are hitting a point where they need to move on to more capable, next generation solutions.

Three key trends are driving an increased need for these dynamic yet easy to manage security solutions; the exponential growth of data, the rapid growth of cloud based solutions and the increased presence of consumer devices brought into the enterprise. All of these trends are creating significant business risk and businesses are feeling worse, not better about their ability to defend against these risks.

In addition, our customers continue to face more data security regulation. Examples of these regulations are HIPPA to protect health information, FFIEC guidelines to protect banking systems, GLBA to protect financial records, FISMA to defend government systems, NERC CIP to protect critical infrastructure at utilities and energy providers and PCI DSS to protect credit card data.

All of these IT and regulatory trends create a very complex and potentially difficult environment for customers. This puts a premium on security prevention solutions that are comprehensive, effective, and easy to implement and manage. With the addition of SonicWALL to our security portfolio, Dell now has an extensive range of security solutions, including Dell KACE endpoint security, application and data security from AppAssure and Dell Data protection, and security services from Dell Secureworks.

Within UTM, Next-Generation firewall technology is an area that is generating meaningful growth for SonicWALL and is a natural extension for customers that grow from being small businesses to large enterprises. Their security needs become more complex and can require higher end solutions like Next-Generation Firewall Technologies. SonicWALL’s Supermassive solution is a leading technology in this space. NSS labs a recognized leader in independent security product testing recognized the Supermassive solution as one of only two in the “recommend” quadrant of this Next-Generation Firewall space. In addition, SonicWALL delivers solutions that help businesses safely and efficiently adopt the cloud addressing many of their pressing security concerns.

Today’s announcement is an important next step to broaden our software portfolio in the critical area of security. Software plays an increasingly important role for Dell as an end-to-end solutions provider.

The combination of the Dell’s reputation as a trusted advisor to our customers, our distribution and sales capability combined with SonicWALL’s innovation and solutions in the security space address these customer needs. It is really a great fit strategically, operationally and culturally.

“Aprima achieved the highest client experience and customer satisfaction scores in the Women’s Health/OB-GYN/Reproductive Medicine specialty practice group, based on the aggregate client experience and customer satisfaction scores on eighteen key performance indicators.”

The company surveyed more than 70,000 practice administrators, healthcare records professionals, and hospital IT leaders to compare the quality and usability of the more than 1,000 EHRs currently on the market. For those of you not familiar with Black Book Rankings, it is a market and opinion research company focusing on technology and services industries. The annual ranking of top EHR and EMR vendors is recognized as an unbiased, accurate market survey.

CLICK HERE to read a copy of the press release.

Cloud. There is no more popular word in the English language today being used across the IT industry. Cloud technologies create an elastic, scalable environment to deliver IT services. IT organizations of all shapes and sizes are taking a close look at their opportunities for cloud computing models given increasing demands from their businesses and end users. And the first step on this journey customers are taking to cloud models is private cloud.

In December 2011 at Gartner’s Data Center Conference, a poll was taken about customer’s pursuit of a private cloud computing strategy – with 80% of organizations saying they will be pursuing a private cloud by 2014. I challenge you to find a hardware or software trend with this much interest.

However, despite this incredible interest many organizations don’t know where to start.

Dell has been talking with hundreds of customers about their private cloud strategy and overall journey to the cloud. Universally, IT teams are reviewing their models for delivering and fulfilling business demands for applications and IT services. In response, we found five recurring points that were top of mind:

• Leverage the infrastructure already in place to conserve capital expenditures
• Continue deploying virtualization as the foundation for greater flexibility
• Preserve existing investments in management solutions
• Promote freedom of choice for infrastructure components
• Evaluate converged infrastructure solutions to speed time-to-market

In response to these evolving needs, Dell has a single strategy for enabling private clouds that uses two approaches to delivery – giving you innovative options for addressing these new IT demands:

Virtual Integrated System (VIS)

First, Dell enables organizations to leverage existing infrastructure to improve the delivery of applications and IT services across mixed physical and virtual environments. Customers are achieving dramatic results in being able to:

• Drive increased business agility and deliver IT as-a-service
• Increase automation and enable rapid workload deployment
• Optimize converged infrastructure and operations across physical and virtual environments

With VIS, Dell is helping customer balance the need for greater agility, while gaining efficiency and balancing the economics of on-premise private clouds and off-premise public cloud options.

vStart for Dell Private Cloud

Building infrastructure is a necessary part of every IT organization. Working with our customers, we concluded that each one saw their infrastructure as a means to an end – to support new application workloads and IT projects like enabling private cloud. It was normal for them to spend weeks purchasing and procuring the components, more weeks to rack, stack and cable them, and more weeks, still, to get it into production. Even for good teams, this could mean two months just to stand up a new application. Dell has solved this hundreds of times a week while our customers might do it once every three to four years.

In response, Dell now offers vStart, a pre-integrated infrastructure solution that enables IT and business stakeholders to accelerate application and IT service delivery. Leveraging VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor solutions, organizations can gain just-in-time, business-ready infrastructure to support their key IT initiatives. With vStart, you can focus on driving your business priorities, not on building infrastructure.

Today, Dell is bringing to market a new solution to accelerate your journey to the cloud. The vStart for Dell Private Cloud solution enables greater business agility through pre-integrated infrastructure and automated self-service delivery.

The solution includes servers, storage, networking and cloud management software, thus eliminating long, drawn-out processes of architecting, building and integrating virtual infrastructure. Powered by Dell’s VIS Creator, vStart for Dell Private Cloud provides many advanced cloud management capabilities out-of-the-box and ready-to-use. Organizations can gain greater business agility to:

• Accelerate Time-to-Value – by making virtual infrastructure productive for applications and cloud initiatives
• Drive Efficiency and Lower Risk – through pre-engineered, reliable infrastructure to reduce time and costs
• Enable Global Cloud Management – to deliver and manage applications and IT services across on-premise private, off-premise public and even hybrid models.
• Deliver Future-Proof Scalability – by providing the foundation with robust & scalable data center infrastructure

Dell has listened to our customers and is delivering innovative and practical solutions to enable the journey to the cloud. With our VIS portfolio and vStart for Dell Private Cloud solutions, we are helping organizations transform their data centers to meet new business and customer demands, helping them achieve more, deliver real results faster and to maximize efficiency.

Today, with the help of Techaisle, Dell Cloud Business Applications released a study revealing a shift in traditional IT as we know it, particularly for growing businesses taking advantage of cloud business applications. In 2012 and beyond, cloud application adoption will continue to rise with small and medium business early adopters adding an average of three new applications in 2012. With 54 citing their IT department as key a decision maker in cloud application adoption, let’s explore the primary elements that encompass the new role of the IT manager.

The Cloud Services Broker

With traditional on-premise applications, IT managers would devote a significant amount of their time to making sure every piece of the technology was running smoothly, fixing bugs along the way and ensuring maximum efficiency whereas cloud-based applications are hosted and managed offsite “in the cloud” (i.e. over an internet connection). As the application is hosted elsewhere, the IT manager now needs to shift focus to managing the relationship with the cloud application provider to ensure they’re achieving their goals and configuring the application appropriately or as some call it, taking on the role of the cloud services broker.

Identifying a Trusted Advisor

Securing a cloud applications provider who will serve as a trusted advisor is an essential first step to ensuring your cloud application implementation works according to your needs. The right vendor will not only work with you to determine the best cloud solutions for your business but help you implement them. With Dell Cloud Business Applications, Dell provides a family of trusted, integrated cloud applications and turnkey services that enable new business processes and deliver rapid time to value.

Crystal Clear Communication

IT managers represent their business to the cloud vendor by clearly communicating both long and short-term goals as well as anticipated barriers to those goals. Having in-depth awareness of these aspirations and pain points puts IT managers in a great position to work side by side with their chosen cloud vendor, developing a set of solutions that enable the business to work more efficiently. In addition, they can monitor for opportunities to improve the existing set of cloud solutions based on their evolving needs.

With the Aprima PQRS feature fully validated, providers who use the Aprima EHR can begin sending data to the federal CMS data registries and realizing the financial rewards of providing excellent (and well- documented) care. CEO Michael Nissenbaum says, “This PQRS validation is just the latest evidence that the Aprima EHR is out in front of the competition. We’ve always felt that we provided a significant advantage to physicians who use our system, and it’s nice to get this third-party proof.”

In addition to the EHR, Aprima Medical Software products include a fully integrated Practice Management (PM) system as well as a Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) service to help practices maximize reimbursement and minimize payment time . The user-friendly Aprima EHR is chief–complaint-driven and offers adaptive learning capability based on each provider’s habits. The unique Intuitive Navigation approach quickly displays clinically relevant content based on the presenting chief complaint, speeding up the physician’s documentation. Aprima’s robust PM software includes all the tools a busy practice needs to manage its patient population, including insurance eligibility, optical character recognition for automating data input, and built-in robust/customizable reporting capabilities.

As we head into 2012 Small and Medium Businesses no longer see cloud computing as a trend, it’s now business as usual. According to Forrester’s Holger Kisker, 2012 is the year cloud becomes mature. This is the trend we are seeing with our customers as their business and IT infrastructure needs grow.

There are real business benefits in moving to the cloud for many companies. Benefits include increased ease of scaling IT as the business grows, freeing up resources, quick implementation of IT resources and new technology without disrupting existing services, and overall improved quality of IT services within the company. The below infographic outlines a practical framework for moving your business to the cloud.

Healthcare organizations face not only public relations issues each time a medical record is lost, the financial impact can also be quite significant. If an employee loses a briefcase containing 10 patients’ medical records, the healthcare provider is held liable for costs associated with losing each of the 10 patients’ records. This cost might not seem like a big number in terms of a healthcare organization’s risk-benefit analysis. However, if you consider that a standard USB drive can hold more than 25,000 medical records and that losing these records could cost a healthcare organization $ 6.4 million in data breach costs. That’s a huge penalty for such a small device.

As a profusion of mobile devices–laptops, USB drives, cell phones, PDAs, and tablets–continue to swarm the modern marketplace, health information has never been more portable and at risk.

The mobile computing environment is further complicated by the intersection of business and consumer technologies. Today both employees and patients can use unsecured personal mobile devices to carry or access health information. This could have unforeseen consequences, as was the case for a US health insurance firm that lost 1.5 million clients’ medical reports on an unencrypted portable drive that was discovered to be missing from the company’s office in 2009. The organization’s decision to save on encryption expenses resulted in $250,000 spent on lawsuit fines, $319,500 in letters to the affected clients, and $1,000,000 for free ID theft monitoring services to the victims.

It should come as no surprise then that mobile devices were identified as the biggest concern in a Dell moderated Focus Groups with 50 CIOs representing small to large hospitals, IDNs, and commercial and government entities.

The Department of Health and Human Services conducted a study looking at 189 breaches of 500 or more records, 52 percent were from theft, 20 percent unauthorized access, 16 percent from loss. In fact, the Ponemon Institute estimated the total economic burden of data breaches on US hospitals about $12 billion.

Why is the breach of 500 records or more significant? If an organization loses more than 500 records containing PHI in a single event, they are required to a) notify HHS no later than 60 days, b) notify at least 3 prominent media outlets in the regions where the patients with breached records live. Upon notification, HHS will post an entry on their website listing the organization, the breach date, and the number of records breached. In today’s world of rising consumerism, this type of public notification can potentially lead to loss of future business.

Electronic health information is here to stay. To improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare, we need interoperable electronic health records and information management infrastructures that make information needed by caregivers for diagnosis and decision-making safe and secure.

To properly manage security in a mobile environment, organizations will need to ask themselves several questions. For instance, is the hospitals network virtualized so that information is managed in the datacenter, not on the device? What devices are being used to access and store health information? Do the devices have enterprise-class information security? Are these devices employee owned? How can organizations lock lost devices to prevent unauthorized access to information? Can the data on these devices be encrypted? Can I have one mechanism for managing authentication credentials across all devices in the enterprise? While organizations will frame their own security policies, many will find that incorporating employee-owned devices into those policies could enhance flexibility, reduce costs, and improve satisfaction.

Irrespective of their preferred approach, organizations will need to consider information security best practices as a part of their overall mobile technology and­ security strategy. For instance, both enterprise-integrated mobile devices and employee/patient-owned mobile devices need to be more secure with identity authentication, encryption, tracking/trace software, anti-malware, backups and extensive monitoring. An integrated approach requires an enterprise security strategy versus point solutions, and must be driven by an overall mobile security strategy.

In an environment where change is the only constant, it is important for organizations to adopt an approach to security threats that enables them to embrace and drive change. Effective mobile device security is a crucial component to making health information truly accessible and secure.

- by Dave Marchand, Washington Report

Author: Rhonda Abrams, who is the Small Business and Entrepreneurship columnist for USAToday.

The other day, I saw a TV commercial for a consumer product, and the ad mentioned, off-handedly, that the product was connected to the cloud. The product being advertised wasn’t a tablet, smart phone or other popular consumer device—perhaps it was a car or household appliance. But when I heard the ad mention the cloud, it hit me—the cloud’s not just for techies anymore.

Face it, the cloud has arrived. It reminds me of a familiar turning point back in the 1990s when you no longer had to explain words like “Internet,” “online,” and “Web,”—people knew what you were talking about. Mention the cloud now and odds are folks aren’t just looking at the sky – the cloud’s now mainstream.

But once a technology achieves mainstream status, we demand more from it. That’s because our needs and expectations for a mainstream technology—rather than an experimental technology—differ. We move away from a technology that’s only for “early adopters” who put up with instability, unreliability, and lack of performance for the joy of being the first to explore a given technology. Instead, once we depend on a technology to run our businesses, we demand minute-by-minute reliability and performance.

Business managers and IT personnel have eagerly embraced the cloud because it provides solutions to things they need done. But they bring a different perspective to their evaluation of cloud solutions than early tech tinkerers (or as I very fondly refer to them, “techies”).

Here’s what today’s business cloud adopters look for:
•A “toaster,” not a tool box. By toaster, I mean that cloud solutions for businesses now need to be more like a mechanism that enables users to perform critical tasks easily and reliably, without needing significant expertise. They want their cloud solutions to increase productivity rapidly and give them powerful capabilities they didn’t have before, or couldn’t get without significant effort.
•To configure, not customize. Okay, maybe they want a “toaster oven”—by which I mean, companies looking to the cloud need the ability to adapt cloud solutions to their particular needs, industry, and business style. But they don’t want to spend the time and money it takes to build applications and solutions from scratch.
•Here-to-stay, not fly-by-night. When a company adopts a cloud solution as an integral part of day-to-day business, it wants to make sure its provider will be around for the long run. The reality is that many of today’s cloud application providers won’t have long-term staying power. Companies can’t afford to bet on a horse that might be scratched from the race.
•Best of breed, not best we can find. To be competitive, companies want the best tools out there. But it takes time—and expertise—to figure out what the best solutions are. A reliable partner can help them identify best of breed cloud solutions.
•Integrated, not independent. Stand-alone applications inevitably mean lack of productivity—often requiring double- or triple-data entry and making it difficult to extract crucial business intelligence. When solutions work together, we save time and money and have greater insight into how our companies are performing.
•Trust. At the end of the day, what businesses want most are solutions and providers they can count on. They want powerful functionality now, continual improvements to make sure they always have the most up-to-date capabilities, customer service when they need it, and world-class security.

Because the cloud is now mainstream, and business customers demand trustworthy partners, we’re now seeing major players, such as Dell, enter the arena. They know that business customers want a reliable partner for the long-haul, with the resources to continue to provide top-of-the-line performance, and the commitment to customer service they demand. And they want one point of contact, so they don’t have to deal with many different providers, keeping track of many different sign-ons.

The reason the cloud has entered our common consciousness is obvious—the cloud presents so many benefits, that once you know about using the cloud, you want more. Whether it’s a consumer storing music, pictures, and phone numbers—or businesses, wanting to be more productive, reduce headaches and costs—the advantages are clear and immediate.

I’m particularly attuned to all things cloud because I have a new book coming out in April, Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth. Get a free digital copy now, though, thanks to Dell Cloud Business Applications by going to www.dellcloudapplications.com. Bottom line- the cloud’s now for everyone. Businesses. Consumers. You. Me. And, yes, even techies.

Rhonda Abrams is the Small Business and Entrepreneurship columnist for USAToday, the author of the bestselling business plan guide in the US – Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies and more than 15 other books for entrepreneurs. Her books are used in 22 of the top 25 entrepreneurship programs in the US and been translated into more than 30 languages. She is the President of PlanningShop, creator of content for entrepreneurs.

Register for her free business tips newsletter at www.PlanningShop.com, “like” PlanningShop’s Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @RhondaAbrams, Below is Rhonda’s third guest post. You can read her other posts Eight New Year’s Resolutions for the Cloud and When You Think Cloud, Think CRM posts by clicking on those links.