Q. Are there benefits for a GP practice in moving to a cloud based electronic health record system?

A. It is likely that new and existing entrants to the GP practice software market will offer a cloud-based solution to GPs. This is where a GP uses a web browser or a software app to access their patient electronic records that are stored in data centres and accessible over the internet. There are lots of benefits to this approach, and also, some challenges.

Let's look at the benefits first:

• Security of the data can be managed centrally by experts rather than at each practice site
• The practice does not need to worry about maintaining servers and ensuring backups of the data
• The patient data is available from anywhere with an internet connection, so it can be accessed out of hours and on house calls.

There are also some risks and challenges to consider:

• You will need two broadband services, from different providers and running over different physical routes, to ensure that if one broadband service goes down you have access to your patient records
• We live in a geopolitically unstable world and this carries the risk that if cyber hostilities break out the internet will go down
• Preparing for these risks raises the solution of having a read-only copy of the cloud data in your practice. But this increases costs and complexity and brings you back to maintaining servers and security in the practice
• GP system vendors need to ensure they have the EU data protection aspects of online cloud storage sorted out.

I think we will see a move to cloud-hosted GP practice software systems. Initially this will probably be for city dwellers with fast broadband services. Whether the solution grows and reaches widespread acceptance will be determined by the experiences of the early adopters.