MedCloud: Healthcare cloud computing system

Existing systems for patients´ data storage are not scalable enough for the increasing number of patients and applications. Cloud computing promises low cost, high scalability, availability and disaster recoverability which can be a natural solution for some of the problems faced in storing and analysing patients´ medical records. This paper examines the impact of cloud computing on improving healthcare services. More specifically, this research details the architectural design for a personal health record system called “MedCloud” that utilizes and integrates services from Hadoop´s[1] ecosystem in conjunction with HIPAA privacy and security rules[2]. A scalable platform is proposed for developers to use in application development and Restlet[3], a web portal, is presented to users, to access the MedCloud system. Later on, the development of the MedCloud model is illustrated through issues analysis followed by an in-depth performance evaluation.