A Study on Signicance ofAdopting Cloud Computing Paradigm in Healthcare Sector Mervat Bamiah, Sarfraz Brohi, Suriayati Chuprat Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia abmervat3@live.utm.my nbsarraz2@live.utm.my, suria@ic.utm.my Abstract- Healthcare sector is information critical industry that deals with human lives. Transforming from traditional paper based to Electronic Health Records (EHRs) was not eicient enough since EHRs require resources, integration, maintenance and high cost implementation. Cloud computing paradigm offers lexible, cost effective, collaborative, multi-tenant infrastructure which assists in transforming electronic healthcare to smart healthcare that consists on the use of latest technologies such as smart mobiles, smart cards, robots, sensors and Tele-health systems via internet on pay-per-use basis for best medical practices. Cloud computing red uces the cost of EHRs in terms of ownership and IT maintenance, also it oTers sharing, integration and management of EHRs as well as tracking patients and diseases more eiciently and effectively. This review paper represents the signiicance and opportunities for implementing cloud computing in healthcare sector. Keywords- Electronic Healthcare, Cloud Coputing, Smart Healthcare I. INTROD UCT ION Cloud computing evolved as a new IT paradigm that provides an agile method to deliver healthcare services in smart way (reducing IT cost, C02 footprint and providing computing services on demand). It is a business model that has inherited the beneit of other technologies such as distributed, pervasive, ubiquitous, utility computing and virtualization to offer cost-efective and scalable IT services [1]. Cloud computing paradigm differs rom other existing technologies such as Remote Hosting Options (RHO) which is data center space and inrastructure ofered by several vendors that involves speciication of the hardware and sotware required to support the contracting health organization for a ixed period besides guaranteeing performance and availability. Cloud computing includes all of these features beside Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which are aligned with healthcare organizations needs and scalability [2]. Also cloud differs rom Client-Server network topologies in terms of its ability to provide robustness and improved traic congestion issues [3]. Cloud is defmed by the National Institute of Stndards and Technology (NIST) as "a model for enabling convenient, on demand network access to a shared pool of conigurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service providers interaction" [4]. Cloud service providers are responsible for lamalul-lail Ab Manan Mimos Berhad, Malaysia jamalul.lail@mimos.my supplying the required computing resources such as hardware and sotware installation, upgrades, maintenance, backup, data storage, and security under the umbrella of SLAs. Moreover, this promising paradigm can support existing electronic healthcare and the uture trend of implementing smart healthcare systems which are able to sense and diagnose complex medical situations. Smart healthcare systems are predictive and have the capability to decide and to interact with the environment. Also they can be energy independent and networked. Healthcare professionals will beneit rom the integration of micro-sensors and micro-actuators in products to better treat and take care of patients in the hospitals and at homes which was not possible before [5]. The urgent need for pervasive and ubiquitous real-time access to patients' data rom anywhere and rom any digital device is essential for proper diagnosis and treatment procedure that leads to achieving high quality of medical services. This review paper is organized as follows. Section-II discusses current healthcare systems issues. Section-III presents emergence of cloud in healthcare. Section-IV defmes the role of cloud computing in enabling smart healthcare. Section-V views cloud computing implementations in healthcare. Finally section-VI will present cloud security issues. II. CURRENT HEALTHCARESYSTEMS' ISSUES Healthcare systems mainly include personal and public healthcare services, teaching and research activities. Personal healthcare services are offered at hospitals, homes and relevant organizations. Public healthcare services involve guidelines for drugs, food and safety policies to maintain a healthy environment. Teaching and research activities are essential for prevention, detection, tracking and treatment of diseases. Technology contributes in providing high quality of medical services for healthcare sector. IT solutions brought signiicant beneits to healthcare by solving issues of human errors and providing an agile way of accessing and processing large volume of patient's information besides saving papers and storage space. The accelerating innovations of smart electronic devices have facilitated the dynamic nature of healthcare delivery. However, still there are several challenges that are facing current electronic health care systems in terms of cost, connectivity, client assistant and disaster recovery. Canada Health Council second healthcare report in 2011 [6] described the current need for connectivity to handle Proceedings of 2012 1ntemational Conference on Cloud Computing, Technologies, Applications & Management 978-1-4673-4416-6 1 12/$ 31.00 © 2012 IEEE 65