The Assessment of Cloud Computing Technology in Health Care Records Management: Opportunities and Challenges

The major purpose of this research was to carry out assessment on challenges and opportunities of cloud computing technologies in health care records management in Kampala International University in Tanzania Teaching Hospital (KIUT-TH). The case study research design was used because a case study is a comprehensive description and analysis of a single situation or a number of specific situations. A self-designed structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 150 respondents selected randomly from Information Technology (IT) experts, faculty administrators from the school of allied sciences, and Students of KIUT-TH. The researchers collected 150 completed questionnaires from the respondents. Data were analyzed using percentage, frequency and statistics. The findings of this research indicate that the management of the security of Patients data and its privacy is a critical challenge in many hospitals where the common data security challenge and privacy address issues stemming from fraud, and theft, from both internal and external threat actors, of a particular data set of information. Constant medical supervision of chronic patients or habitants at remote, isolated and underserved locations, and readily available healthcare information updates was found to be a very good opportunity of integrating cloud computing technologies in healthcare records management. It is therefore recommended by the researchers that the standard security measures such as Intrusion Detection systems (IDSs) and Biometrics systems should be put in place to minimize data and information insecurity. The researchers also recommend that staff training on how to use the cloud computing system be conducted and the use of secure supported applications should be implemented as a mechanism to prevent internal and external patients data loss.