We are seeing a notable shift in healthcare cloud computing. Cloud healthcare can significantly lower cost by implementing cloud data storage and deploying technology, gain efficiencies, and even do advanced tasks, such as personalizing patient care and developing treatment plans.
The services offered by cloud computing vendors, such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, are evolving constantly. Therefore, a Black Book Research found that almost 80% of the hospital CIOs are asking their staffs to configure, manage, and work with a HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure. It is not all; in fact, 91% of those CIOs is allowing products and services that are more swift, flexible, and nimble with the multiplication of healthcare data.
This also means that now healthcare professionals and other executives have to adapt to the changing cloud landscape.
Evenset offers reliable cloud computing solutions and custom software services to healthcare providers. We have listed below the emerging impact of cloud computing in the healthcare sector so that you are aware of what you will be receiving from our solutions and in what you should invest your time and money on.
Security and Blockchain
Security is going to be the biggest consideration in next-gen cloud computing taken forward by healthcare providers and cloud computing vendors. With so many unbeatable cyber-crimes surfacing today, the need for cybersecurity measures has never been so important and this is fundamental in the evolution of healthcare cloud computing.
The blockchain is one of the solutions that national organizations are considering, as more medical centers get serious about their specific requirements for increased regulation, business growth measures, and risk management.
Doug Brown, President of Black Brooke, explains, “The cloud provider must ensure through regulatory audits that physical security requirements are effectively met, therefore, they are employing strict facility and asset access control through a combination of biometric and token-based security protocols.”
In addition to security, blockchain technology can also address record issues – multiple EHRs within a single health system can cause problems in patient care and safety, and patient identification.
Collaborate, Adapt and Enhance
Things can only change when the roots support the process. Therefore, the next steps for the evolution of cloud technology in healthcare are for both the cloud services vendors and healthcare providers – they must adapt, associate, and then enhance.
Jim Fitzgerald, chief strategy officer at CloudWave, says “Adapt is a simple term with a lot of technical depth behind it. Efficient and crisp adoption of cloud IaaS/Platform/SaaS models in healthcare requires adaptation from both the cloud service provider and the healthcare organization. Collaboration is essential to adaptation and essential to helping the healthcare industry take the best advantage of cloud IT models, while Optimization is the end goal, letting cloud model take control over to improve availability, security, and recoverability of the healthcare center, while also developing new efficiencies”.
Vendors can create a bridge to cloud technology through technical expertise and pave a way for cloud services providers to help the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers also have an important role to play – they can assist and make this adaptation process happen by doing reviews and assessments, and consider ways of consolidation and aggregation to enable efficient and successful cloud model.
Hybrid Cloud Computing
Hybrid cloud computing is a unique combination of public and private cloud technology that ensures a highly secure and productive cloud environment. It is possible that hybrid technology will be the millennial of cloud set up.
For the Next Gen of Cloud, healthcare providers and facilities will have to opt for a hybrid cloud. Michael Robinson, Vice President of Healthcare North America at VMware, a subsidiary of Dell, explains, “This may sound very basic, but a huge barrier to cloud adoption – and tapping the efficiency and security gains that come with it – is that healthcare organizations and clinical labs want to run their own private environments and do not trust public cloud providers to secure their data.”
“Healthcare IT is understandably security-focused, but the security risk to an organization is more heightened from a lost device or stolen password than it is a cloud breach of patient information”, he continues.
Healthcare providers need to trust external cloud experts because they have the expertise and skill to research and invest in developing a highly capable and secure cloud. In fact, outsourcing cloud computing to the third party will unburden them from the responsibility of building and securing entire infrastructure, and let them focus on core functionalities.
That being said, in such a scenario, healthcare providers must have to work with a flexible and open mind. Hybrid cloud computing will make the addition and/or changing of cloud destination easier without causing issues to the IT or business operations.
Real-time Data for Special Care and Cost-effective Treatment
Healthcare organizations must understand and accept the fact that exceptional care and treatment plans require exceptional data in real-time. If you consider yourself a forward-thinking healthcare organization, you must embrace the latest technology at all point of patient care, from alerting them for next appointment to diagnosing and treating critical illnesses. You should employ web-based technology to engage with the provider as well as the patient at the clinical level. This is what we strive to do at Evenset.
Brian Owens CIO at Bendcare National Rheumatology Group Practice that uses cloud technology adds, “This must include EHR strategies certainly but should also extend to complementary mobile applications and Internet-based access points that integrate information from the entire clinical ecosystem to capture and support the needs of the patient.”
Hospitals also will need to commit to data collaborating and information sharing, he further adds. Data is out there, but too often in the healthcare industry, it is fragmented, incomplete, and siloed. To truly understand what is best for a patient, and most importantly to allow providers to comprehensively understand how their treatment plan is affecting the patient’s disease state, providers must have the entire picture – and here, cloud computing can help, he finishes.
To conclude, we must find ways to retrieve, incorporate, and channel information from the pharmacies, physicians, insurance companies, lab test providers, and even the patients themselves to develop a comprehensive view of the patient’s’ medical journey. We must also collaborate to let information acquired to deliver value in immediate ways.