IT experts are redefining the way technology is used within healthcare by driving innovation in Cloud Application Virtualisation (CAV) so that information can be accessed from any location.
The Government is pushing hospitals to run more of their IT systems through the Cloud. The challenge is that many applications were never designed to work in this way
Cloudhouse Technologies is working with a number of organisations, including Advanced Health and Care, which supplies systems to NHS trusts across the country, and also GE Healthcare in the US.
Through its new technology, the company is able to take existing applications one step further and put them on the internet, meaning they can be securely accessed from any location. This includes new applications and, importantly for the healthcare marketplace, established or legacy applications. This means they can operate on modern operating systems without the need to change a single piece of the underlying coding.
Speaking to BBH, Mat Clothier, chief technology officer and founder at Cloudhouse Technologies, said: “Before Cloudhouse, I used to run a business that provided IT to SMEs. I saw that there were lots of doctors surgeries and hospitals dispersed across the county and thought there must be a way to do things better.
“There are lots of great systems and software applications, but the IT that sits in the middle is hard to do anything with.
“When doctors say they can’t log onto the system, or that it’s running slow, they seem to accept that, but for me it seemed like nonsense.
It may take a while for everyone to adopt it, but I suspect we will see more and more trusts doing a bit of both in the future
“We had a goal of making hospital systems that are really easy to deploy; systems that can interconnect with MR equipment, with blood pressure monitors and all sorts of other bits and pieces. This, however, adds complexity and we wanted to remove some of this complexity and make it easier for trusts to upgrade software and get the most from their IT systems.”
Corporate IT and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) application management is a multi-billion pound global industry dominated by complex products that are expensive to run and have remained fundamentally unchanged for the best part of a decade.
Cloudhouse’s CAV solution aims to disrupt this market by eliminating the hassle and cost of deploying and managing software.
Through this solution, healthcare applications will become as simple to consume as mobile applications on a smartphone.
Taking this into the cloud makes it more accessible and means hospitals will no longer require huge server rooms and the associated costly equipment.
Cloudhouse chief executive, Nick Harmer, said: “The Government is pushing hospitals to run more of their IT systems through the Cloud. The challenge is that many applications were never designed to work in this way. For organisations like the NHS there is also the need for high security and some apprehension that exists among staff who do not understand the true nature of Cloud-based systems.
For us the economy speaks for itself. We can’t justify spending public money on a bunch of servers when we can move systems into the Cloud
“Our mission is to help them move more and more applications across, safe in the knowledge that data is secure and encrypted. It may take a while for everyone to adopt it, but I suspect we will see more and more trusts doing a bit of both in the future.
“For us the economy speaks for itself. We can’t justify spending public money on a bunch of servers when we can move systems into the Cloud.”
There are three core parts to Cloudhouse’s technology that allows movement of legacy applications into the cloud. An Open Container enables software to be dropped in, providing built-in conflict resolution. An Enterprise Application Store provides rapid provisioning and click-and-run capability. A Data Accelerator then securely distributes data to the application.
