Putting patient data safety first

FireHost has been chosen to provide secure, high performance and fully compliant cloud services for The Patient Safety Company (TPSC) from its data centre facility in Amsterdam. FireHost has been supporting TPSC from its London and US data centres for several years, but January’s addition of FireHost’s Amsterdam facility will allow TPSC to extend its reach into the Central European healthcare market, offer existing local on-premise clients access to FireHost’s cloud services and vastly improve the performance of its services in this region.

The TPSC’s integrated cloud platform for healthcare applications, now supported by FireHost, allows healthcare professionals to access electronic healthcare records, manage documents and conduct clinical audits securely from any kind of device and at any time, using applications designed by healthcare experts or custom applications. From small medical centres to large-scale university hospitals, TPSC’s integrated cloud platform is currently used by more than 300 institutions worldwide, with end users including consultants, doctors, nurses, facility managers, IT staff and admin.

As part of the company’s multi-data centre strategy and to support the company’s continued growth, TPSC chose to add FireHost’s Amsterdam facility for a number of reasons. Firstly, the protection of patient data is a major challenge for any healthcare organisation and an issue TPSC takes incredibly seriously. As such it was vital the company found a secure cloud provider in mainland Europe with experience hosting applications where security and strict compliance regulations are a top priority. In addition, FireHost was the standout choice due to the superior performance and speed of its service and given its success hosting TPSC’s applications in other regions. Although security functions often slow a cloud infrastructure’s performance, FireHost’s creative architecture sidesteps any tradeoff in performance, which TPSC values greatly.

"I feel comfortable knowing that my clients’ data is safe with FireHost," said TPSC CEO and founder Niels Greidanus. "The support is always great and the performance of the servers is better with FireHost than the performance of our existing clients that still have an on-premise solution. In fact, we ran a customer satisfaction survey recently, and the response from cloud customers is higher than our existing on-premise clients."

Mike Shaughnessy, FireHost director of business development, also commented on the project and why it may be of particular interest to the UK and European healthcare markets today. “Recent headlines regarding patient data have really emphasised the importance of securing confidential information of this kind. What organisations like The Patient Safety Company are doing is proof that security and performance can be simultaneously achieved, with no tradeoffs. The concept of cloud being less secure than on premise solutions is not true, and projects such as this one build a case for cloud’s defence.

“We are experienced at tackling the most complex of standards such as HIPAA in the US market, and understand the many technical requirements that come with them. This means that customers such as The Patient Safety Company don’t have to invest time in managing their infrastructures to ensure they meet the latest security and compliance standards and can instead focus on doing what they do best; delivering exceptional healthcare solutions.”