Telemedicine in a cloud — A review

Abstract

The Information communication Technologies (ICT) has assumed an important role in all domains of life today. The computation requirements are often larger than resources available at hand in an enterprise and it would like to outsource it for high speed computation or data management requirements. In other cases a small enterprise would like to lease computation or data archiving resources as per demand. Cloud computing is a new paradigm which may be used to handle such situations. It offers a virtual environment at a small initial investment by entrepreneurs planning to develop large applications scalable as the scope and workload increases. The computer hardware and software are available in virtualized environments of cloud computing offering Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platform as a Service (PaaS) through Datacenters and Cloud Service Providers (CSP). The paradigm shift provides elastic infrastructure, efficiency of resource utilization, reduction in upfront capital investment and focus on core activities. A model for cloud computing for telemedic services is being developed to cater for large data archive of Clinical Data Records (CDR), Decision Support Systems (DSS) and event based notification and monitoring system in a typical hospital. In this paper we have reviewed the rapid growth in cloud computing activities, available opportunities and services with the early birds in this technology. Beside this the hospital information and medical data services architecture using cloud services has been discussed in the context of the model being developed. Data storage service, Security service, scalability and performance issues have been discussed.