Massachusetts based CloudWave is a provider of on-premises and cloud-based technology solutions for hospitals. It is a Health IT company, for sure, but at its core, there’s a social impact component driving its day-to-day operations.
Although the company serves hospital systems of all sizes, it found its best fit with community hospitals, of which there are close to 5,000 across the U.S., according to the American Hospital Association. For over 100 hospitals in this niche market, CloudWave delivers a suite of OpSus Cloud solutions; a HIPAA and HITECH-compliant cloud built specifically for healthcare. The company also offers on premises IT infrastructure solutions and technical consulting.
“Many community hospitals sort of backed into an IT strategy over the years,” said James Fitzgerald, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at CloudWave. “They did so with neither the salary and staff budget nor the diversity of experience on staff that larger enterprises have to create an IT strategic plan, gain board support for the capital investment required, and maintain their solutions over time. It’s our mission to empower community hospitals with technology solutions built to help them achieve operational sustainability.”
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Fitzgerald, who joined CloudWave in 2011, said hospitals frequently focus on applications software and don’t allocate enough budget or staff to run it. He discusses the three primary advantages of deploying a cloud-based solution; improved security, availability, and recoverability.
“First, they will immediately improve their security stance,” Fitzgerald said. “Their cost of better security is proportional, and built into the cloud service. The cloud has expert security engineers and ethical hackers and leading-edge security infrastructure, but the community hospital is only paying a fraction of the overall cost, instead of using capital dollars they don’t have for equipment they won’t get full use of.” CloudWave participates in a voluntary security audit each year and for the third year in-a-row has excelled in an evaluation of 32 components including compliance and security.
Secondly, hospitals who migrate to a cloud-based system will have a stronger availability stance, meaning more and better resources are allocated to ensuring systems stay up. “Their equipment has gone from a room next to the morgue under the sewer pipes to a sparkling Tier-4 data center in a dedicated facility,” said Fitzgerald.
The third big benefit, he says, is recoverability: through the company’s OpSus Recover solution, hospitals have access to a fully-compliant, secure method of recovering their EHR and other critical applications. The solution also scales, offering hospitals a variety of service levels to meet specific requirements.
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Numbers make a clear case for the company’s platform: OpSus Cloud solutions offers a 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement, with an actual experience of 99.985 percent uptime. 57 of CloudWave‘s customers were listed in Hospitals & Health Networks 2017 roundup of HealthCare’s Most Wired, a ranking of the industry’s best equipped hospitals when it comes to technology and cybersecurity.
The well-documented trend of cloud adoption in health IT is echoed in the company’s prospective client base: some 80 percent of hospitals CloudWave reaches out to are considering a move toward the cloud, with 60 percent of clients who implemented a new platform in 2017 picking the OpSus Cloud as their course of action.
CloudWave is a member of HPE’s Preferred Healthcare Partner Network and a member of Cloud28+, a worldwide community of cloud service providers.
