As the year rolls to a close, we’ve scanned the industry and consulted our own internal experts to collect forecasts on what we can expect for healthcare IT in the new year. Here are a few of our 2023 healthcare IT predictions:
Highlighting HITRUST
This year, the Sequoia Project, selected by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) as the Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE) to support the implementation of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), released requirements for becoming a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN). It also selected HITRUST as “the first certifying body and certification for organizations to prove they comply with the TEFCA security requirements for their Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) designation.”
As a result, in 2023, HIEs/HINs will engage in becoming HITRUST certified as they endeavor to achieve QHIN status and the entire industry looks to strengthen cybersecurity. The HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF) is designed to manage risk and meet HIPAA and other regulatory compliance requirements and frameworks including NIST, PCI, FISMA, FEDRAMP, and GDPR, among others.
AWS at the Edge
Along with the other hyperscalers, AWS has been investing heavily in edge computing innovation. For healthcare, this promises to result in transformational IT capabilities, as posted in Fast Company:
“In modern healthcare, MRI, sonogram, and other body scans make extensive use of artificial intelligence and machine learning for analysis. While this has been a boon for detection and treatment, it has also created additional technical burdens on hospitals, eating up bandwidth by transmitting data to the cloud for processing, or creating a need to hire technical staff to build on-site data centers. With hybrid cloud and edge computing these complex analyses can be done on-site, allowing patients and doctors to get results faster, providing peace of mind and speedy treatment.”
2023 will see edge computing powering a wider variety of home health devices that continuously collect and process health data, providing real-time actionable insights and heading off emergency events with timely interventions.
Azure Action
Gartner research indicates 50% of all companies will subscribe to an MDR (Managed Detection and Response) service by 2025. At Cloudticity this year, we’ve already seen some Azure healthcare customers start to use these services. We expect this trend will significantly increase in 2023 as Microsoft continues to build out SIEM/SOAR and XDR capabilities. We also expect competition in the Azure MSP space to temporarily decrease, as up to 40% of 2022’s Gold Partners stand to lose their Gold status due to Microsoft retiring the program. The Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) program has been replaced with the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, and partner designations are now exponentially harder to achieve and maintain.
Coalescing in the Cloud
Driven by the realities of tough economics and continuing uncertainty, 2023 will finally be “The Year of the Healthcare Cloud,” as healthcare organizations are forced to abandon legacy infrastructure in favor of more robust cloud technology. By the end of the year, we’ll see considerable momentum where large, complicated, and previously “off-limits” applications such as EHR and PACS/VNA begin wholesale migrations to public cloud providers for the purpose of lowering costs while increasing security, reliability, and scale.
