As we continue to expand the Partner Voices series, I get the opportunity to talk to more and more of our partners, which I love. I also get the inside scoop on some innovative solutions entering the marketplace. Just recently, I spoke with David Powell, Vice President of Cloud and Managed Services at TekLinks about their cloud-delivered electronic health record (EHR) applications.

David answered some questions I had about how TekLinks can provide doctors and their staff with a fully HIPAA-compliant data as a service DaaS solution. Of course, the TekLinks' solution is Cisco-certified, which is why we are so interested in seeing how they implemented the solution as a stand-alone hosted app, or as a complete virtual desktop for any number of end users.

Frankly, there are times when David talks and I simply can't follow, unless it's around our shared tastes in music, or the few times that we might agree on a finer point of college football. In this case however, it all sounds so simple when David explains the importance and relevance of the TekLinks solution, so it's easier if I just let him speak for himself.

"Doctors' offices are confronted with a challenge not dissimilar to hospitals and larger enterprises -when it comes to connectivity, even the smallest clinic or private practice is dead in the water if their network goes down because all of their patient data lives in their EHR software. They can't see patients or proceed with billing and insurance processing.  So they have less and less tolerance for downtime, which is then complicated with the increasing need to satisfy HIPAA compliance. And these requirements have grown exponentially over the past several years," Powell said.

David told me that earlier this year he met with TekLinks' cloud and virtualization experts to review current trends in the market, and business continuity for healthcare providers quickly rose to the top of the list.

He continued, "TekLinks has been working closely with physicians clinics without an IT staff for 12 years, and we have been listening to this growing need for high availability without compromising data security. So we asked ourselves, 'how do we have an always-on solution that also meets the standards imposed by healthcare's regulatory entities?' Seeing the need in the market, and knowing what we were capable of doing with a Cisco-certified cloud infrastructure, we decided to offer a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that provides data security and high availability to smaller practices."

TekLinks' Cisco architecture allows these practices to benefit from a robust, enterprise cloud environment, while the desktop virtualization technology provided by other partners such as Citrix and Microsoft, makes the EHR application completely mobile, secure and consistent across any device.

We wrapped up our conversation with some thoughts on how TekLinks is committed to creating that fully secured environment for HIPAA, while still allowing the healthcare staff to access the hosted HER app through any smartphone, laptop or tablet, at any time; anywhere.

That approach allows practice administrators to worry less about costly hardware and licensing upgrade cycles. The scalability of the cloud solution allows them to budget resources much more effectively as their business grows. In addition, peripherals such as printers, scanners, voice recognition, and other office devices work seamlessly with the hosted desktop to ensure maximum operational efficiency.

David concluded with, "With Greenway's EHR application running in our cloud, they can mitigate the risk of being down and satisfy their compliance goals. These physicians and their staff can take advantage of Greenway's award-winning software and what the cloud has to offer, all as a fully managed service."

"The excellence of this solution, much like that of Alabama football's longstanding domination of the sport, enables physicians to rely upon the always-on capabilities of the cloud while trusting in the security of their patient data. Now they can get back to focusing on what's most important in their practice: their patients."

So there you have it. An elegant solution indeed, and yet David sees the need to get in at least one Alabama football reference for this poor Wake Forest fan here. I don't even know why we spoke. I could have simply put down "Roll Tide!" as his answer to every question, and he probably would have been OK with it.

Seriously though, this new solution from TekLinks offers a pretty seamless solution for physicians and their staff looking to securely access EHRs anytime; anywhere. Regardless of our different sporting allegiances, it's always enlightening and entertaining to talk to David and I highly encourage you to use the comment section here to let us, and TekLinks, know what you think about their latest solution.