Cloud Computing in Healthcare – a Literature Review on Current State of Research

Nowadays, IT resources are increasingly being used in all areas of the health sector. Cloud computing offers a promising approach to satisfy the IT needs in a favorable way. Despite numerous publications in the context of cloud computing in healthcare, there is no systematic review on current research so far. This paper addresses the gap and is aimed to identify the state of research and determine the potential areas of future research in the domain. We conduct a structured literature search based on an established framework. Through clustering of the research goals of the found papers we derive research topics including developing cloud-based applications, platforms or brokers, security and privacy mechanisms, and benefit assessments for the use of cloud computing in healthcare. We hence analyze current research results across the topics and deduce areas for future research, e.g., development, validation and improvement of proposed solutions, an evaluation framework