Applying the Software-to-Data Paradigm in Next Generation E-Health Hybrid Clouds

Health care providers have over years continuously rejected Public Cloud technology for understandable concerns regarding privacy and confidentiality. The pick up rate on cloud computing in health care has been very poor reminding at the typical hype curve profile. Coincidentally Google Health has been discontinued and Microsoft Health Vault has switched focus and turned to the slightly "softer" ambient assisted living market. It seems that the idea of using Platforms as a Service and Software as a Service to manage and distribute patient data in support of new distributed patient centric care models and services will require second thoughts and new ideas in order to receive another chance to penetrate global health care markets. The 2010 EC Cloud report briefly discussed the possibility of a reverse cloud approach aiming at sending software to the data rather than the other way round. This thought seems to be worthwhile exploring further, as it would also sit well with the fact that the overall amount of data is currently growing much faster than the available bandwidth, a gap that continues to widen. Therefore it would be entirely reasonable to consider ideas to bring the software to the data rather than the other way round. This approach would also address existing governance, QoS and security issues. Our paper proposes a taxonomy and an architecture for the implementation of the software-to-data-paradigm in health care scenarios. The model is based on the "FI Core Platform" an innovative concept currently under investigation under the European 7th Framework (FP7).