Healthcare is a $3 Trillion Industry constituting of multi-faceted market opportunity right from research, finding a cure to diseases, making the cure available in the market to maintaining records and accurate financial data. With advancements in the way people access resources, services and facilities, healthcare is nonetheless in adopting modern technology in all its associated fields.
Table of contents
- Cloud and Healthcare
- Storage and Access to Data in Cloud
- Compute Costs Scale with Usage
- Patient Data and Treatment History on Cloud
- Access Management and Collaboration
- Simultaneous Recording, Monitoring and Alerts with IoT on Cloud
Cloud and Healthcare
While the data wave is sweeping every industry, healthcare produces petabytes of data per patient and a huge chunk of this data is valuable to treat the patient better and making post-treatment care effective and affordable. Implementation of Cloud Computing in Healthcare is a path-breaking step in this journey which improves many aspects of the whole industry as the processes become online and we need to record and access the patient data in a secure and safe manner simultaneously complying with the government norms and regulations.
Storage and Access to Data in Cloud
State of the art patient care technology requires continuous monitoring, storage and access to patient data for better analysis and treatment at the moment and research to develop better treatment options in the future. Storage of huge amounts of data at own data centers is a costly affair for any small and medium Healthcare Chain or Clinics and Hospitals. It includes huge costs on IT staff, data center hardware and huge compliance audits to ensure HIPAA and HITRUST compliances at all times.
Migrating to cloud platforms makes huge cuts in the cost of storage and completely snaps out the hassle of maintaining a data centre. Once you develop a compliant infrastructure on any leading public cloud infrastructure provider, the costs come down by as much as 10th of what you were spending before. Amazingly low costs of storing data backups at multiple locations on cloud bring your OPEX down considerably.
Compute Costs Scale with Usage
Many of research and development programs need powerful servers that could handle the heavy weight lifting and compute intensive operations of higher research work and teams inside a lab and spread across the globe. Compute costs with an Autoscaling on demand infrastructure leverage the technology to cut down the huge investments required for a 24×7 round the clock available infrastructure, which sits idle while no one is using it.
Cloud makes it possible for Healthcare companies to pay only when they are using and get more resource during the spikes while the scientists run simulations demanding high compute capacity.
Patient Data and Treatment History on Cloud
Before talking about the benefits of cloud and how it could impact this area of HEalthcare, let’s talk about why this is the most sensitive part of the whole HEalthcare and Cloud Lifecycle.
PAtient information and treatment data is crucial information and could be misused by greedy and only motivated by profit enterprises to manipulate their pricing policies, insurance terms and conditions, and supply strategies to earn more profit out of a patient’s situational priorities. Hence the government regulates the intricacies around storing patient data and imposes heavy consequences on the defaulters.
Cloud Infrastructure can be made to comply with HIPAA and HITRUST as long as the engineers building it, are experienced, as well as have knowledge of what this compliance actually means. Today, the industry very well lays down the standards of building a compliant architecture for HEalthcare companies over the cloud to record, store and manage patient data and treatment history with security and secrecy.
Access Management and Collaboration
We’ve spoken about the need of complaint architecture and cloud Infrastructure now let’s shift our focus to another aspect that actually unfolds another capability of cloud that makes a huge contribution to healthcare. Access to online diagnosis with the help of connectivity and robotics.
We are already treating patients across the globe when a surgeon sits in a simulator and its robotic arm that performs the real operation. This is a very common example to explain the concept of access and collaboration.
To implement technology for reducing the cost of diagnosis and accessibility to a qualified practitioner, the cloud enables Access management to secure patient data and enables collaboration across partners in the process. The policies to manage access are strict and can be modified by the administrators on the go.
Simultaneous Recording, Monitoring and Alerts with IoT on Cloud
With a plethora of possibilities for IoT devices in the Healthcare industry, new business are being formed by companies with vast possibilities. IoT and cloud-enable Simultaneous recording, monitoring and alerts enable us to take care of patients with lesser chances of careless mistakes, better and reliable data, and real-time decision-making abilities.
Much said, there is a lot of scopes to discuss the possibilities that introducing cloud brings in HEalthcare. Every industry calls for modernization and up-gradation on all fronts, Healthcare with CLoud supported by an experienced team like ours at ClickIT TEch helps companies grow and get better ROI.
