## 2 e-Health Cloud Opportunities
Many of these are not interoperable or not directly coordinated with each other at an organizational level. More about existing e-health standards is available in the ITU-T technology Watch Report, 2011 in [26]. Moving to the Cloud-based solutions, it is possible to find better ways to resolve these issues and provide more efficient and cost effective solutions. In addition to providing independent per-healthcare provider solutions, the e-Health Cloud also has the potential to support collaborative work among different healthcare sectors through connecting healthcare applications and integrating their high volume of dynamic and diverse sources of information. Dispersed healthcare professionals and hospitals will be able to establish networks to coordinate and exchange information more efficiently. These networks will be flexible and scalable in integrating and sharing services and data; all of which help in reducing costs and increasing the effectiveness of the healthcare organization. Collecting patients' data in a central location as the e-Health Cloud results in many benefits:  
* **Better patient care:** the ability to offer a unified patient medical record containing patient data from all patient encounters across all operators. These records will be available anywhere and anytime allowing healthcare providers to have a comprehensive view of the patient's history and provide the most suitable treatments accordingly. * **Reduced cost:** the ability to take advantage of the capabilities of CC and create a collaborative economic environment where the overhead costs are shared among the participants; with the flexibility to only pay for actual resource utilization. This feature is very suitable for small and medium sized healthcare providers where they can utilize advanced IT infrastructures and services to support their healthcare operations without facing high initial and operational costs. Another cost reduction aspect is the savings gained from making medical records available globally, thus there are no costs incurred in exchanging and sharing patients' data around the world. * **Solve the issue of resources scarcity:** the ability to overcome shortages issues in terms of IT infrastructures and health care professionals. This is very important in some areas (such as remote rural communities) with the shortage in primary healthcare facilities [27]. The Cloud enables healthcare providers to use remote medical services and data that help in providing primary healthcare in such areas. It also allows various health care specialists to offer their services remotely thus saving time and effort and reducing the need to have experts available everywhere. * **Better quality:** the health care operators by having their clinical data stored in the cloud will facilitate supplying concerned entities such as the Ministry of Health or the World Health Organization with information on patient safety and the quality of care provided. The information will be attained by one of two methods; (1) aggregating existing data to arrive at the indicators requested and/or (2) providing on-line ability for health care operators to enter/access data directly. Health care data stored on the Cloud can be aggregated and reported along the lines of generally accepted health care quality indicators such as ones published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) [28]. AHRQ quality indicators are accepted worldwide and many health care operators use these indicators as measures of performance. For example, the US government will be rewarding US health care operators in 2012 on their ability to meet quality indicators by increasing the payouts they receive from it. This measure was a byproduct of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act signed by President [PERSON] in 2009 [29]. Quality indicators can includes infection rates, lengths of stay and readmission percentages.