Recently I’ve been lucky to meet with the CTO’s of two important Canadian public sector organizations, Canada Health Infoway and the Province of Ontario.

Indeed Dennis Giokas kindly presented on Cloud Computing in Healthcare at our recent seminar in Toronto.

This presentation was about the recent CHI Cloud white paper, which is quite visionary in its description of how Cloud will evolve and grow in E-Health.

In particular, and this was the common theme for Ontario as well, was the forecast of increasing use of SaaS (Software as a Service) as a delivery model.

This is a simple and logical part of the Cloud trend of course, but exciting to see it described in both strategy and real-world terms – The Province for example has recently a numbed of SaaS-specific tender RFPs.

E-Health Big Data PaaS

It’s exciting because both Dave and Dennis also describe it in terms of benefit to the local economy, and how this would be best served through new local SaaS ventures.

It is a better procurement model for many agencies and ideal for new and innovative software, like Open Data. This is an area packed full of opportunities for SaaS-savvy entrepreneurs.

Dave’s corporate strategist Samantha Liscio describes overall sector  effectively through this presentation: Open Data, Big Data – Open Data in Ontario.

This provides the overall strategic context for both Open Data and Big Data – A combination that could be achieved through licencing, data production and then the use of that data somehow in a new social media context.

The Cloud model for then delivering this via a PaaS approach is described in the E-Health Cloud white paper. Specifically on page 25 they  describe a need for Big Data Analytics, and also that it should be delivered via a PaaS – Platform as a Service:

Whether it’s called “predictive analytics,” “smart computing” or “analytics on cloud,” cloud computing and analytics provides a comprehensive offering of a combination of products that enable enterprises to move their business intelligence, data warehousing and online analytical processing (OLAP) workload to a cloud platform.

While the implementation of cloud analytics can take several forms at a high level, the following are parts of a cloud analytics platform that would be of interest to an enterprise:

 A virtualized infrastructure to support the basic cloud tenants to build a private/public/hybrid cloud

 PaaS in-line with the underlying cloud infrastructure that can support the analytical needs of reporting, analysis, dashboards, extraction, transformation and load (ETL) and predictive analytics

 Customized analytics applications in a PaaS/SaaS offering which are uniquely positioned for designing and developing customized analytics applications. The cloud provider is responsible for on-demand provisioning and the maintenance of software and hardware.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

How this can be leveraged for new SaaS ventures is described in a recent blog of mine, ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants‘.

This post describes the role that a new Google PaaS service, called Google Big Query, cloud play in these various scenarios of creating new SaaS applications.

As per the title of this article, “Big Data Analytics for E-Health”, via Google PaaS” is one example of this effect.

Where that previous blogs describes various applications, like an email tool that exploits the data mining capability from within GMail, that leverage this PaaS component to build a more powerful SaaS application.

This could be repeated for E-Health, where it used the same way to better augment and expand e-health applications, especially in scenarios like email where it can be used for critical information delivery quickly and easily.

Like delivering records from your GP to your ZenVault account!:-)