Alan Watson, Data Centre Director at Logicalis (www.logicalis.com), says:

Budgets are shrinking but requirements are growing and the complexity of changing applications is a challenge to most organisations. Over the last 12-18 months or so there has been a growing requirement to make IT more dynamic to address the needs of the business and its users, not just IT for IT sake. Making applications available anywhere and at any time but in a reliable, secure way.

Historically the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt true centralization and virtualization as it is seen as difficult to make the user experience good enough.
Technology has changed and true benefits can now be shown. The use of truly virtualized IT solutions not just servers or storage has been available for some time. This makes “on demand IT” a reality and as such the business benefits in reacting to current and new requirements as well as making IT more cost effective.

Architectures that enable SOA and there use with WEB 2.0 type interfaces makes tailoring applications much easier and in turn user friendly. In turn this enables benefits across the board and allows changes to be made easily, allowing health care staff to have an input into what they need in a way they want to use.