As the introduction to our upcoming Cloudbook.com article states: “Few topics have dominated the {U.S.} political news cycle over the past year more than health care reform...”

The buzz about healthcare is almost as great as talk about cloud computing in the tech industry-- and the two may well be related. Scott Donohue, Vice President of the investment banking firm, TripleTree, writes in his article that the linkage between health care reform and cloud is “actually quite significant.” His viewpoint is “that cloud computing may end up mending a health care system that has largely let a decade of IT innovation pass by and now finds itself trapped in inefficiency and stifled by legacy IT systems.”

While many health-care CIOs and members of Smart Enterprise Exchange may find that assessment harsh, I thought it would be valuable to share Donohue’s views with you and get some feedback from this community’s members.

Now that U.S. healthcare IT and medical records must be digitized, will cloud-based solutions proliferate? Donahue describes as “hypersensitive” the issues of privacy and security that medical services must address, and he notes that only “cloud solutions from vendors that understand health care nuances can build winning solutions.”

What’s your view? I’d like to hear from U.S. health care IT executives about your experiences so far, as well as from non-U.S. companies and public-sector agencies delivering these services. Are you considering public healthcare cloud solutions? Building your own private clouds?

Download the full article here and let me know your thoughts.

--Vince Vasquez