Cloud services for healthcare: Insights from a multidisciplinary integration project

Healthcare organisations are forced to reconsider their current business practices and embark on a cloud adoption journey. Cloud-Computing offers important benefits that make it attractive for healthcare (e.g. cost effective model, big data management etc.). Large Information Technology (IT) companies are investing big sums in building infrastructure, services, tools and applications to facilitate Cloud-Computing for healthcare organisations, practitioners and patients. Yet, many challenges that such integration projects contain are still in the e-health research agenda like design and technology requirements to handle big volume of data, ensure scalability and user satisfaction to name a few. The purpose of this chapter is (a) to address the Cloud-Computing services for healthcare in the form of a Personal Healthcare record (PHR) and (b) demonstrate a multidisciplinary project. In doing so, the authors aim at increasing the awareness of this important endeavour and provide insights on Cloud-Computing e-health services for healthcare organisations.