When it comes to implementing innovations that move businesses forward, health care is often criticized for being far behind other industries. That said, if you look at the progress health care has made within the past decade, it seems to be constantly developing instrumental products, including life-saving prescriptions, more efficient technology platforms for physicians and easy-to-use health apps for patients to keep tabs on their health.

Where health care falls short, however, is not with the products themselves but how these innovative tools connect, run and are supported. Each of these technologies mainly relies on the cloud and require a deep level of support to ensure the safekeeping of sensitive information and its secure and efficient transfer.

Despite technology’s rapid change of pace, hospitals and other health facilities are usually reluctant to make any beneficial upgrades to their data centers and IT operations due to the potential costs of implementing a new platform and a tolerance of the less efficient platforms already in place.

Complacency, however, can be a dangerous approach in various perspectives of the chief financial officer and chief technology officer of a hospital. While the CFO focuses on capturing value from spending less, the CTO seeks to adopt the latest innovations in order to increase hospital workflow and efficiency. A CTO’s role has drastically changed from focusing on the technology alone to driving cost improvements, patient care, operations and more.

While the CFO provides the final stamp of approval for any large spend, like IT infrastructure, the CTO today has more influence on strategy and plays a larger role in overall decision making.

A CTO’s Role In Cloud Adoption

When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt coined the term cloud computing back in 2006, enterprises were excited to dig in and see how they could move their data to a cloud-based solution. Hospital executives were extremely reluctant to make the jump. Regulatory compliance requirements are difficult to keep up with such as the HIPAA and HITRUST agreements involving comprehensive evaluations that are expensive and time-consuming.

That said, the cloud allows organizations to scale resources nearly instantaneously, providing an extremely powerful capability for health care organizations to have at their fingertips. Health care is a 24/7 business, and those organizations leveraging cloud-native solutions are aiming to see better efficiency and overall responsiveness to the needs of patients and practitioners alike. These benefits, though, are not without challenges.