The real opportunity with the cloud lies in the aggregation and analysis of all the information being processed through it, but many organizations are unclear how to begin.

Moving forward, the biggest driver of cloud adoption may be the inability of legacy patient data systems to keep up with systems that better support and promote interoperability.

In order to keep up with their peers, healthcare organizations are realizing they will need to navigate to cloud-hosted productivity platforms, due to their cost saving and practical advantages in handling increasingly complex work loads.

Organizations need to consider how ERP fits into their health IT infrastructure and the best way to deploy it to ensure success.

Despite its rapid growth, cloud computing remains shrouded in mystery for many potential customers, so health IT managers need to have the right questions at hand to determine whether a provider is right for their organization.

First impressions count, says AMA chief James Madara, so vendors and policymakers need to ensure new health IT is ready before it’s pushed on the provider community.

Healthcare organizations are increasingly adopting multi-cloud environments, experts note, as it gives them the option to choose specific cloud service models and service providers for certain tools or data sets.

For an increasing number of organizations the cloud has become a viable option, but health IT managers still face a case-by-case decision when it comes to the percentage of their IT systems they should migrate.

Not knowing the full extent of how a cloud outage could potentially impact business is a risk very few organizations can afford to take, the report notes.

One could say that the potential applications for the cloud are limited only by the imagination of human beings.