| I did some very basic research for an essay on "Healthcare in the Cloud", and yes, the regulatory side sounded very painful. Among the relevant regulations, the big ones are HIPAA and HITECH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_an... http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/administrative/enforcem... A big point that I remember was that a HIPAA breach was up to 1.5 million dollars in fines. "A maximum penalty amount of $1.5 million for all violations of an identical provision" This is one of the markets where BigCos can and should make a difference (and loads of cash in the process, but well, that's what regulations get). On the flip side, HITECH introduced up to 20 billion dollars in incentives for adopting Electronic Health Records (EHRs), so maybe the millions in compliance are worth it for some startup :) I got some interesting data from here ("Opportunities and Challenges of Cloud Computing to Improve Health Care Services"): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222190/ and some information by CompTIA’s Third Annual Healthcare IT Insights and Opportunities study. http://www.comptia.org/news/11-11-16/Healthcare_Practices_Em... |