Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Health Administration

College

College of Health Professions

First Advisor

Jillian B. Harvey

Second Advisor

Mark Mellott

Third Advisor

Larry Learning

Abstract

There are many advantages for healthcare organizations to use the public cloud for storage/computing. However, moving data outside of the organization’s physical boundaries implies lost or reduced control and greater reliance on Cloud Service Providers (CSP) in determining where the data is stored and how it is secured. When that data is sensitive healthcare data and at high-risk for cyber/national security violations as well as, belonging to U.S. citizens, the need for careful planning and legal compliance increases sharply. The following study evaluates the legality and considerations of public cloud use for healthcare Chief Information Officers (CIO) and the need for holistic federal regulation in order to protect healthcare data from foreign and domestic threats. Healthcare CIO’s cannot continue to wait to move into the next century of technologies due to the current lack of legislative protection, which is hindering their ability to act swiftly and confidently in front of their board members, executives, peers, employees, and patients. In this study, we prove a need for the US legislative system to provide a unified legal framework that protects and enables healthcare organization to migrate their workloads/data to the public cloud using CSP’s without fear of retaliation through the US legal system.

Rights

All rights reserved. Copyright is held by the author.

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