An Ecosystem Approach for Healthcare Services Cloud

Patient-centric healthcare and evidence-based medicine with the emphasis on prevention and wellness promise to deliver better and more affordable healthcare. At minimal, they require health related information to be shared among a community including patients, providers, payers, and regulators. It is important for IT systems to facilitate information sharing within such communities. Furthermore, we argue that it is highly valuable to develop IT technologies that can foster sustainable healthcare ecosystems for collaborative, coordinated healthcare delivery. The emerging cloud computing appears well-suited to meet the demand of a broad set of health service scenarios. In particular, the concept of shared infrastructure and services provides the foundation for supporting healthcare service ecosystems. This paper proposes an ecosystem approach to identify high-level requirements for cloud computing technologies to provide hosting environments for sustainable healthcare ecosystems. We draw the lessons and principles from the sustainable ecological ecosystems, review some of the existing IT-enabled healthcare ecosystems, and provide our view on the imperatives for cloud computing research to support future healthcare IT needs.