Leveraging cloud computing for systematic performance management of quality of care

Governments and healthcare providers are under increasing pressure to streamline their processes for efficiency, to reduce operational costs while improving service delivery and quality of care. Systematic performance management of healthcare processes is important in determining if quality of care goals are being met at all levels of the healthcare ecosystem. The challenge is that reaching these goals requires the aggregation and analysis of large amounts of data from various stakeholders in the healthcare industry. With the lack of interoperability between stakeholders in current healthcare compute and storage infrastructure as well as the volume of data involved, our ability to measure quality of care across the healthcare system is either limited or non-existent. Cloud computing is an emerging technology that can provide the needed interoperability and management of large volumes of data across the entire healthcare system. In this paper, we review various cloud computing applications for surveillance and performance management of quality of care in healthcare. We also introduce a framework for achieving systematic surveillance and performance management across the entire healthcare system.