Today, at Dell EMC World, Virtustream — the enterprise-class cloud provider company in the Dell Technologies family of businesses — announced that they are offering a new service called Virtustream Healthcare Cloud.

This service provides cloud-based hosting of mission-critical healthcare platforms and applications in an environment that is completely compliant with all Health Insurance Portability  and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) regulations. Customers are able to get the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud with fully-managed services and availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) of 99.999% uptime. The service can be deployed in both public and hybrid cloud models.

As healthcare organizations transition to the near-exclusive use of digital Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, they are faced with the dual challenges of access to records and securing them. EMR data needs to be accessible to patients, doctors, and analytical medicine applications, all while remaining fully-secure and compliant with a complex set of regulations. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud offering enables healthcare organizations to achieve these goals as a managed service.

To give an idea of why this is a big deal, several other public cloud providers will allow customers to run this type of workload in their infrastructure, but the customers are 100% responsible for ensuring the HIPAA and HITECH compliance. The Virtustream Healthcare Cloud provides that compliance built-in.

With consolidation happening across the industry, and more hospitals and healthcare organizations joining into collaborative “Medical Group” type organizational structures, the ability to store, protect, and share EMRs in a secure and compliant public cloud solution becomes even more desirable.

Today, the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud service has been certified by Epic, a leading provider of EMR applications. I’ve spoken with a few of the folks at Virtustream and I believe we’ll see the certification with additional EMR software vendors coming in the near future.

You can read the Virtustream press release on their Healthcare Cloud here and read more details on the solutions here.