Frank Opelka, associate medical director of the American College of Surgeons, spoke about the medical field’s need for a cloud-based application to simplify the health care process at a lecture Wednesday.

Hosted by the Department of Surgery and Perioperative Care at Dell Medical School, the talk emphasized the importance of health care facilities using new technology, such as cloud systems, to better overall health care productivity and patient connections.

Opelka studies data reform in American health care and the massive needs for more operable and portable applications in the medical field.

Opelka said surgeons and health care professionals need to spend more time in operating rooms and less time manually entering data. In the age of the Affordable Healthcare Act, Opelka said this is crucial to provide quality health care at a low cost.

“These applications are critical for leveraging health care data for better health and lower cost,” Opelka said. “Real solutions are starting to come out of here.”

The lecture focused on the technical factors that would be needed in such an application, and how the professionals in attendance could both acquire and utilize the cloud application. An application exists like this in nearly every other industry in America, but the health care industry is still lacking, according to Opelka.

Attendee Hank Jones said multiple factors — including the need for education about the issues and the slow pace of the health industry to keep up with technological changes — are keeping such a necessary tool off of the market.

“The medical industry has been dragging their knuckles through time for decades,” Jones said. “Special interest groups are fighting to educate the government and the other masses on [this type of development].”

Dr. Kevin Bozic, chair of surgery and perioperative care at the Dell Medical School, iterated the specific need for this programming in Austin.

“One of the unique challenges we have in Austin, unlike other major metropolitan places, is that we don’t have a modern health system with a single electronic health record,” Bozic said. “This type of application is very relevant in this market because … the data doesn’t sit in one place. We need a universal source of electronic data that can be accessed by the physician, patient, billing, whomever. We want to incorporate this into our medical education and clinical care that we provide.”