The Food and Drug Administration has announced its proposal to create a unique device identification (UDI) system for medical devices, which will impact both suppliers and providers. The rule itself has its genesis in a report from 1999 stating that 100,000 people die annually as a result of medical errors that could be avoided. In 2004, a law for identifying pharmaceutical products using the NDC was created and went into effect in 2006. Pharmaceutical companies were required to print bar codes on their products so they could be scanned at the bedside and in the operating room. There was no comparable standard such as the NDC for medical-surgical products, which set things in motion for UDI.

Ask any number of people working in healthcare, or any industry for that matter, to define the "cloud" — or cloud computing — and you will likely get a variety of answers with varied degrees of accuracy — not unlike a weather forecast. For many, the cloud has a degree of mystery, as in something that happens "out there," which is essentially correct. Cloud technology enables anyone — or anyone authorized — to use the Internet from anywhere to access computing capabilities and data that are hosted somewhere else, as opposed to onsite. The cloud offers considerable benefits to healthcare, which is undergoing dramatic and essential transformation without the necessary financial or technological means to support the level and speed of change required. The confusion and related reluctance to embrace the cloud stem in part from a misperception that the cloud is a new concept.