Cloud services - Enhancing the Malaysian healthcare sector

The Malaysian hospital environment is predominantly device focused: whereby application services are typically installed manually on devices where the services are required. For an example, the software to review MRI images are only being made available to certain devices, typically located at the scanner itself. In order to facilitate resource integration and data sharing to provide better services to patients, the medical world eco-system is undergoing a transition from a device oriented based architecture to a software as service based architecture (SaaS), this translates to the availability of application service on every device. Devices here can be categorized from smart phones to PDA's and workstations located both local and remotely. To fully support medical related applications in a dynamic environment, medical devices will need to be treated as being part of the cloud, where software modules are automatically deployed on demand when required with the appropriate resources. In this paper, we will propose an architecture that will tightly link the various medical institutions' and as at present, the level of access to medical information is not the same among medical institutions. Cloud computing will bridge the current gap and provide a much connected environment hence improving overall efficiency of operations.