What a week, it has been and If I had to describe it in one word, I would say ‘ CLOUDY ‘ – No, not because of weather (well that too, if you spent last week in England) – but I say so because of my engagement last week – it was all about cloud – meetings, key note at an event and what a great way to finish it by writing about it.

OK, so another episode on cloud native but this is a spin on healthcare application and use of containers. For my last write up, please visit (Demystifying-cloud-native-applications)

A quick recap – what are containers? Containers offer a logical packaging mechanism in which applications can be abstracted from the environment in which they actually run.

Why Containers: Instead of virtualising the hardware stack as with the virtual machines approach, containers virtualise at the operating system level, with multiple containers running atop the OS kernel directly. This means that containers are far more lightweight – they share the OS kernel, start much faster, and use a fraction of the memory compared to booting an entire OS.

Healthcare organizations are demanding more applications as they increase mobility and add flexibility to their IT infrastructure. Healthcare app containers are emerging as a key way to manage and deploy applications at scale. Also, as they search for tools to enable their digital transformation, they increasingly land on containers as a technology to enable that shift to cloud native application architectures.

Driving Innovation in Healthcare with Containers and Docker, Healthcare industry is rapidly embracing EHRs, enabling providers to improve patient engagement and deliver better patient outcomes. They have more opportunities than ever to leverage big data, generated as a result of advances in healthcare research, adoption of wearable technologies and mobile health applications.

While developing new applications, healthcare providers can identify business domains to develop microservices based architecture.  In a typical setting, microservices architecture could be developed for managing workflows around patients, encounters, appointment and scheduling. FHIR is the next generation healthcare interoperability standard to digitise the exchange of patient health information across heterogenous systems. Building microservices based on FHIR resources specification, an organisation could easily establish interoperability with growing list of healthcare applications. In the UK, NHS Digital also makes extensive use of the HL7 FHIR standard. (https://digital.nhs.uk/services/fhir-apis)

In the multi cloud era, healthcare organisations can also become cloud-ready by moving their existing applications to a container framework, allowing them to leverage the benefits offered by cloud. Containers act much like they do in the physical world, i.e. separating data based on predetermined characteristics. When migrating from one cloud storage model to another, it’s much easier to move data if it is contained in one place or separated from data that does not need to be moved. For example, Docker simplifies the process of creating and managing containers on premise, on cloud or on hybrid environments. Multi-tenant SaaS applications  As healthcare organisations develop innovative use-cases to provide better patient care based on big data, predictive analytics and machine learning, Software as a Service (SaaS) becomes a preferred approach to offer services to providers and patients.

While security is paramount for data related to healthcare, Containers provide heightened security by design by separating data. Containing access to PHI by clearance level or department protects data in other containers. While the data in the breached container is still compromised, the other containers are virtually separated and unaware of each other, making cross-penetration impossible.

OK, so far, all sounds great, right?  The benefits of containers are clear but there are deployment challenges organizations need to be aware of before committing to wide-spread adoption.

Containers can sometimes be too complex to integrate into existing environments or too many skilled staff are needed to manage the container. Integration into legacy IT infrastructures is a valid concern. Certain infrastructure solutions can be in place for years and still function as needed, but containers and virtual machines may not function as desired due to bandwidth restrictions, potential incompatibility of physical servers or lack of cloud platform deployment.

OK, concluding this episode, I believe there is definitive value in container deployment in healthcare even with the challenges that prevent organisations from getting there. It’s no longer a question of if healthcare organisations should fully embrace cloud technology, but when. And to clarify, when I say cloud, I mean multi cloud (read previous blog – multi-cloud-starts-with-2-x-w-why-what). Moving to the cloud and containers-based application provides the flexibility and resources to address healthcare providers’ most pressing challenges that they have in present time. To take advantage of every benefit of using multi cloud technology, make sure you go forward with a true cloud-native solution.

Coming next — >> Cloud Native Cloud Platform Infrastructure and Healthcare Cloud

Thank You !