As a user interface designer, I am tasked with solving end user problems and sending the solution to software engineers for implementation as code. Now that the market is flooded with cheap cloud computing resources, lots of vendors are popping up selling software services like financial management (Mint) and data backup (Jungle Drive.) Some make sense, but some are worth being concerned about.

For example, consider an EMR delivered via the web. If the data is sent via the web to a remote data storage facility, there’s not only the bandwidth bottleneck to contend with (diagnostic images won’t exactly be small files), but there’s the undeniable fact that the data is no longer in your hands. Indeed, who regulates the cloud? Sure, it’s possible to encrypt data in transit and transmit that data via secure networking protocols. Yet, for all the VPNs, firewalls and intrusion detection systems in a Fort Knox data center, any data transferred offsite is still offsite.

For that reason alone, an EMR application served on a secure local network, on hardened local servers, is the most practical implementation. It gives doctors this new technology that can help them, without taking away, letting them benefit from information technology but still retain physical control and ownership of their medical records data. Plus, the local connection will let office staff continue to work instead of watching upload progress bars pack.

It simply isn’t practical to expect physicians to adopt an EMR software that forces them to change the way they handle patient information, let alone defies them to even use it.