August 06, 2010
This week IBM and health insurance company Aetna rolled out a cloud offering that references patient data from electronic medical records that are stored in the cloud and shoots off recommendations and updates about the progress of treatment cycles and prescription history and interaction. As BusinessWeek noted, this partnership was formed in conjunction with a subsidiary of Aetna called “ActiveHealth Management to create the hosted Collaborative Care Solution product that provides clinical support for physicians and allows patients to access their own data without requiring an investment in new infrastructure.”
This service combines technology from IBM along with the analytics software that powers ActiveHealth’s evidence-based CareEngine clinical support system that is hosted in the cloud. This system can take the wealth of data and analyze a range of aspects of patient history, including pending medical insurance claims, drug and lab data, and other patient information. According to IBM, this service is priced at up to $1,000 per month per physician on an unlimited-use basis.
As comfort grows with storing patient and other sensitive data in the cloud, this type of service might catch on in larger circles but for now, the adoption of the service is limited to only a handful of clients. While it was not made clear how the “cloud” functions, we can assume this is a private cloud due to the complex regulations governing data that contains sensitive personal information. The benefits to a service like this are clear, however, with a lowered cost of infrastructure—at least according to the initial reports from early adopters—and with the instant accessibility of patient data in order to better monitor care and follow-through with medical orders, including prescription fulfillment, treatment history, and possible drug or other treatment interactions.
Full story at BusinessWeek
Researchers from the Suddhananda Engineering and Research Centre in Bhubaneswar, India developed a job scheduling system, which they call Service Level Agreement (SLA) scheduling, that is meant to achieve acceptable methods of resource provisioning similar to that of potential in-house systems. They combined that with an on-demand resource provisioner to ensure utilization optimization of virtual machines.
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Experimental scientific HPC applications are continually being moved to the cloud, as covered here in several capacities over the last couple of weeks. Included in that rundown, Co-founder and CEO of CloudSigma Robert Jenkins penned an article for HPC in the Cloud where he discussed the emergence of cloud technologies to supplement research capabilities of big scientific initiatives like CERN and ESA (the European Space Agency)...
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When considering moving excess or experimental HPC applications to a cloud environment, there will always be obstacles. Were that not the case, the cost effectiveness of cloud-based HPC would rule the high performance landscape. Jonathan Stewart Ward and Adam Barker of the University of St. Andrews produced an intriguing report on the state of cloud computing, paying a significant amount of attention to the problems facing cloud computing.
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05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/02/2012 | AMD | Developers today are just beginning to explore the potential of heterogeneous computing, but the potential for this new paradigm is huge. This brief article reviews how the technology might impact a range of application development areas, including client experiences and cloud-based data management. As platforms like OpenCL continue to evolve, the benefits of heterogeneous computing will become even more accessible. Use this quick article to jump-start your own thinking on heterogeneous computing.