Healthcare providers, payers, and life science companies are making huge investments to transform the healthcare industry. Oceans of patient data and millions of disconnected data points across the healthcare continuum are fueling this change.
The strong shift from “why cloud?” to “why not cloud?” is reflected in the significant uptick of cloud adoption over the last few years.
Industries are constantly striving to push their boundaries further to leverage the latest technologies that could help them have an edge over others. An integral part of this is “Cloud Adoption” or the process of “Moving to the Cloud.” Today, every industry is on the hunt to explore the latest technologies that could refit their business operations with better and improved solutions. And the healthcare industry is transforming itself to keep pace with modern demands.
So, how does cloud computing fit into the Healthcare Industry? Let’s discuss in brief.
Healthcare Cloud Computing
Healthcare has traditionally taken a laid-back approach when it comes to taking up new technology like cloud computing.
The paradigm shift in healthcare operations began in the early 2010s when an increasing number of healthcare organizations started to migrate their core systems and databases to the cloud. The HIMSS Analytics Survey report on the 2017 Essentials Brief: Cloud provides us with greater insight into how Information Technology has benefitted the healthcare industry. The analytics report could help us discern the fact that close to 65% of the study respondents utilize cloud or cloud services for their healthcare organizations. A predominant part of this usage encompasses data hosting, recovery, and back up of operational applications. The reports further confirmed that 88% of the respondents avail the cloud services through the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, ensuring greater flexibility and ease of operations.
Source: https://www.himssanalytics.org/sites/himssanalytics/files/Cloud%20Study_2017%20Snapshot.pdf
Is This the Right Time?
Though the Healthcare industry has slowly begun to exploit the benefits of Healthcare Cloud Computing, there still lies a sea of services and solutions that could offer the healthcare operations a new lease of life. The year 2019 witnessed some of the key digital transformations in the healthcare industry. A disruptive technology like Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, and Augmented Reality revolutionized the healthcare industry.
The key advantages of cloud adoption for the healthcare industry
- Reduced Operational Costs
- Increased Security
- Adapt to the evolving IT infrastructure
By giving us comprehensive access to our personal medical information, digital technology can make us all agents for change, of pushing for the one thing that we all really care about: a medical system that focuses on our lifelong health and prioritizes prevention as much as it does treatment. Putting people at the center of health care means we will have the information we need to make intelligent choices that will allow us to lead healthy lives.
– Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman
op-ed piece in Wall Street Journal
The statement mentioned above by the Microsoft Chairman, Bill Gates, upholds the colossal change that can be anticipated in the healthcare industry with the aid of the latest & emerging technologies.
Why Should the Healthcare Industry move to the Cloud?
Over the years, there has been a lot of debate on the healthcare industry’s need to move to the cloud. Even the industry-leading giants were initially skeptical about moving their healthcare systems to the cloud infrastructure due to technical uncertainties. As the digital transformations started to scale up, the healthcare organizations worldwide have begun to evaluate the role of cloud in the transformation of healthcare services. The healthcare sectors have now slowly started to assess the strategic benefits of the cloud infrastructure, paving the way for a remarkable change in the industry.
Enabling digital transformation using cloud services is one of the key technology upgrades that is skyrocketing today. The cloud infrastructure opens up to a whole new world of solutions and advancements that could offer a new dimension to the healthcare industry.
Related: Top 5 Benefits of Enabling Digital Transformation using Cloud
Cloud Adoption
Cloud Adoption goes beyond the customary definition of ” repository to store data in a cloud network.” Beyond just storing your mountain of valuable data, cloud computing offers a lot more by altering & optimizing the workflows, digitalizing the core services, enabling easy access & retrieval of healthcare records, paving the way for data analytics, and several more valuable benefits.
Related: Know more about Microsoft Azure & Affordable Cloud Storage from Azure
The Significant Benefits of moving to the Cloud
Better Patient Care: Cloud Computing allows for efficient patient care as it acts as the sole access point for all healthcare records. Acting as centralized and virtual data space, the cloud allows multiple systems to access a unique record at the same time with ease. With the aid of automated reminders and notifications, patient care is no more an uphill task.
Efficient Data Security: The substantial advantage of cloud adoption or moving to the cloud is data security. Enhanced and robust security measures that meet all the compliance standards are in place to ensure there are zero possibilities of data leak or any breach of data. All the critical information, including the patient records, are in safe hands under the cloud infrastructure.
Integration and Scalability: The cloud infrastructure also allows for diverse integrations like cloud to cloud, cloud to on-premise, or a combination of both the integrations. Besides, it also permits data integration and application integration without a drop in operational efficiency. This makes the cloud infrastructure scalable and adaptable to the evolving requirements.
Structured Data Storage: Storing the data or information in the cloud has a lot of benefits. The cloud infrastructure allows for diverse data storage options with enhanced possibilities for backup and recovery. With the aid of StorageGRID and virtual storage containers, the cloud infrastructure promises an efficient information management system.
Cost-Efficient & Improved ROI: The most appreciated feature of the cloud system is its cost-efficiency. Cloud ensures decreased data storage costs as the infrastructure excludes the need for any hardware or external storage provisions. Moreover, cloud computing works on a subscription or on-demand model, providing you the complete power on the total cost of ownership and promising a greater ROI.
Flexible and Adaptive: Unlike other self-hosted models, Cloud computing offers you the flexibility to alter the workflows as and when required. Based on the healthcare systems’ evolving needs, the cloud can scale up or down without disrupting operational efficiency. The cloud infrastructure is also adaptive to changing IT infrastructure needs.
Ease of Operations: Demanding minimal operations and promising high efficiency, cloud computing is agile and scalable.
Advanced-Data Analytics: Industries and enterprises around the globe rely on data analytics to enhance their strategies and improve ROI. Given the scope for improved integrations and data analytics, cloud compliment each other well on arriving at critical data-based decisions. Cloud analytics offers new insights and helps in decision optimization.
Does cloud computing support HIPPA compliances?
Large public clouds such as Azure, AWS, etc., support HIPPA compliance by signing the Business Associate Agreement (BAA) for their platforms. Moreover, it’s also the responsibility of service providers to ensure that they have configured the platform in the best suitable way and their cloud infrastructure has the HIPPAA protections as required by the clients.
Why are healthcare companies adopting the cloud?
Healthcare organizations can significantly reduce the overhead costs associated with an on-premises setup when solutions are hosted at a service provider. Cloud computing can provide on-demand access to healthcare applications and patient data collated from multiple resources and shared with important stakeholders in real-time. Additionally, when applications are hosted on the cloud, businesses are immune from service outages, and disaster recovery can be activated quickly if that were a need.
It’s Now or Never
The latest Global Market Insights Inc. report states that the healthcare cloud computing market will grow to $55 billion by 2025. Apart from highly desired features such as collaboration, availability, scalability, efficiency, and security, the cloud is aligned with HIPPA compliances while providing more personalized and remote patient care. For these reasons, many leading healthcare organizations have already started to adopt cloud computing technologies to deliver quality care, reduce operational costs, and improve the overall administration process.
Cloud computing increases the efficiency of the healthcare industry by:
- Enabling easier and secure medical records-sharing
- Automating backend operations and maintenance
- Facilitating the build and deployment of healthcare apps
PreludeSys can get you on the cloud without disruptions
PreludeSys is a valued Microsoft Gold Partner and an industry leader with extensive hands-on experience with cloud migration design and implementation. In particular, we have accelerated digital strategies for various healthcare clients across the globe.
These included:
- Improved clinical productivity through data transparency
- Personalized patient experiences and drove revenue growth
- Streamlined operations and delivered quality care
Please speak with us today about a tailored strategy for the cloud that meets your business needs!
