The adoption of cloud computing by the Healthcare Industry has helped to significantly decrease of capital expenditure, allowing many healthcare organizations to upgrade their current IT systems to better manage their data.
As a result, the Global Healthcare Cloud Computing Market is slated to grow at a CAGR of 21.95 percent during the 2015-2019 period.
How Does Cloud Computing Save Money?
Cloud computing, a program or application that runs on shared servers, simplifies the computing model for organizations. Instead of investing in and maintaining the IT infrastructure and applications, end-users can use the pay-per-use model just as an individual pays for utilities such as electricity and water. Cloud computing models consist of three types: private, public, and hybrid.
What are the Benefits of Cloud Computing?
Agility
Cloud computing enables healthcare providers to adopt agile business models, develop new capabilities in limited time, offer cost-effective services, and share information with high flexibility across the value chain.
In the past, insurers in the US focused only on the B2B model that essentially dealt with companies; however, they have started focusing on the B2C model because of regulatory changes. The need to manage individual customers has increased the demand for new, improved, and flexible systems for better targeting and personalization of services.
Also, the increased adoption of EHRs has resulted in the implementation of the SaaS delivery model for use in various applications and associated technologies. Stringent rules and regulations by various governments has prompted the industry to store, collaborate, and share data on the cloud.
Personalized Healthcare
Cloud computing helps in the storage of information, medical records, files, and images of patients in a digital format. Mobile devices are gaining popularity with the adoption of BYOD policies by various organizations in the Healthcare industry.
Apart from healthcare providers and physicians, patients can also access their medical data. Medical records and images can be shared with medical practitioners worldwide in real time and treatment and outcomes can be monitored remotely. If an individual falls ill while travelling, her/his medical records can be accessed by local doctors on the cloud.
Advantage of Big Data
Predictive healthcare modeling will improve healthcare services as medical professionals can analyze and provide improved and accurate medication to patients. Medical data gathered by healthcare providers are massive, complex, and difficult to store with traditional IT infrastructure and data management tools.
They include clinical data, prescription data of patients, medical images, laboratory data, data from pharmacy and insurance departments, and data gathered from social media sources. Big data analytics has the potential to improve care and reduce overall expenditure. Analytics will help in extracting insights from datasets and making informed decisions.
Availability of Healthcare Services at Remote Locations
The treatment of chronic diseases is more expensive than the treatment of acute illnesses as patients with a chronic condition are often admitted to a hospital or a healthcare facility. Healthcare providers can deploy mobile devices that could be linked to the cloud platform, and continuously monitor patients in remote locations, thereby reducing costs incurred by patient visits.
Providing healthcare services to remote locations with the help of cloud computing has one more key application area. As healthcare infrastructure and services in rural areas of many developing countries are very basic, mobile devices can be used by patients to access information about local clinics and hospitals.
What’s the Biggest Challenge in Using Healthcare Cloud Computing?
Security issues and data privacy concerns including unauthorized access or loss of sensitive patient information is a key challenge affecting the ability of cloud service providers to gain the confidence of healthcare providers. Modifications to HIPAA privacy, security, enforcement, and breach rules have been introduced to ensure patient data security and privacy.
This is yet to be fully realized and comprehended by cloud providers as organizations are looking for the most reliable partner who can sign the BAA, while the ones who market themselves with only standards such as the HIPAA standard are bound to lose to the emerging competition since they can associate only with the HIPAA compliant providers.
Healthcare institutions prefer private clouds over public clouds because of security concerns, though public clouds do offer the necessary data privacy and security assurance.
