The stage is set for the adoption of cloud-based electronic medical record (EMR) services in Australia, with the availability of managed service offerings that tick all the boxes for healthcare providers.

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According to Darren Jones, Regional Director, Customer Relations & Sales for InterSystems, this is because hospitals and providers don’t want to manage their own hardware or data centres. “In the case of a prospect in Victoria, for example, they see real value in the managed service offering that InterSystems can provide, which is unique,” said Jones. “We are the only ones who have the capability to manage InterSystems TrakCare or IRIS software with our dev team right next to the support team.

“We also take the approach that customers want certainty on the financial model over the life of the contract. This is more appealing than having to assign someone to constantly optimise the service to get the best deal – as you would do with public cloud elastic pricing. Our team have a rock star reputation with our hosted customers and they go above and beyond to make this an aspect of the customer’s business they don’t need to worry about.”

Overcoming perceived security, privacy and data governance risks is also very important for the acceptance of cloud-hosted offerings, said Jones.

“Because our offering has been well established in Chile, the U.K., the Middle East and now Australia we have a strong model including the value of the managed service. We go further into creating the best offering that is unique to our client’s needs. In Chile, for example, that even extends to having ownership of the building that houses the data centre in Santiago. We also offer the sort of redundancy and fail over that our customers can’t afford on their own.”

Jones also has some advice on cloud migration for the vast majority of healthcare organisations whose EMR systems are currently located on-premises.

“Nearly everything will go to cloud, and organisations should work closely withvendors they trust who are creating tailored solutions specifically for their needs and circumstances. We partner with our clients for the long term and itis therefore natural for us to provide – and to be trusted to provide – the infrastructure and services that the solutions run on. The best time to discuss your cloud strategy is now, not when the hardware is about to come up for renewal.”