Advantages of Cloud Computing in the Healthcare Industry
The Healthcare industry has adopted cloud computing technology for telemedicine, healthcare databases, SaaS, EMR, public, and private healthcare. Healthcare and cloud computing together is a $5.4 billion industry. From clinical, financial, and administrative functions, the healthcare sector is truly embracing information technology and cloud computing technology. The healthcare landscape is changing faster than ever before, due to the demand for delivering high-quality medical services for less money, and increased competition between health care services providers. Hospitals, research clinics, private health care institutions, and doctors are looking for solutions to improve daily operations, efficiency, and reduce their spending.
Cloud computing technology, if implemented and managed appropriately, can enhance the core activities of healthcare. Cloud computing provides healthcare with the opportunity to improve services for patients, easily share information across various stakeholders, improve operational efficiency, and streamline processes.
Collaboration
The healthcare sector requires an ample amount of collaboration between doctors, healthcare experts, and medical specialists working together at the same time. With the implementation of cloud technology in healthcare, information can be streamlined, synchronized, and shared in real-time for enhanced collaboration.
Faster Upgradations
Software deployment and upgradations on the cloud are faster compared to on-premise hosted software. It is comparatively less expensive to manage services on the cloud and provide no service interruption to the users. With faster services, healthcare service providers, and their patients to experience services with utmost bandwidth and speed.
Security and Privacy
Regulatory frameworks like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for the protection of personal data, or the US’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for secure data portability, or the HITRUST Alliance’s CSF, an industry-mediated certifiable standard for safeguarding sensitive information, Cloud computing help companies to store and retrieve information remotely and help to create automation of backups, role management and disaster recovery option with ease.
As online scams and frauds increase, the chances of data breaches are at an all-time high, and cybersecurity becomes mandatory for all kinds of organizations. Cloud computing enables risk management, risk mitigation, and monitoring services to protect unauthorized access to secure vital information.
Reduced costs
Not all health care institutions require investment in expensive IT hardware and infrastructure. Cloud can help healthcare providers to maintain their services directly on the server and have a flexible costing on the services being used.
All companies struggle with higher expenditure costs, which is recurring in the case of software and systems. For healthcare service providers, more than 50% of the IT budget goes into the maintenance of existing systems and leaves no room for innovation.
Cloud computing operates on a dynamic and budget-friendly model with health care providers to save up money from spending on expensive systems infrastructure and equipment.
Mobility
Mobile applications and services are backed by the cloud infrastructure, which assures secure storage of data, computing power on the cloud and ensures that the healthcare providers can enable their staff to access information anytime and everywhere. This is becoming a mandate for telemedicine, which helps doctors to cure patients across boundaries.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence has become the spotlight for healthcare services as more robotics and machines enter into healthcare operations. Cloud platforms are integrating ML and AI into their services, which is helping enterprises to manage massive amounts of user data, and drive data analytics through various touch points across different healthcare services.
Low-code/No-code Development
With the implementation of cloud computing, healthcare providers get access to low-code platforms to deploy applications on the cloud. These low-code and no-code platforms help non-technical people to create processes, integrate them with existing information channels, and accelerated digital strategy.
Data Storage
As telemedicine and telehealthcare adoption drives across various digital healthcare services, access to electronic medical records, mobile apps, and patient portals require a vast amount of data storage. Cloud enables real-time analytics and collaboration with various healthcare experts regularly. This is not possible if the healthcare provider stores the data in house and has to share petabytes of data streams for each request. Cloud enables data storage with ease and lets people collaborate without requesting to pull all of the data together. It also helps healthcare providers to save thousands of dollars in maintaining physical servers on-premise.
Scalability
The biggest restriction of a self-hosted infrastructure is that it doesn’t allow seamless scalability. Cloud computing allows healthcare service providers to be dynamic, flexible, and adjust data storage capacity according to the demand. Healthcare institutions can adapt to faster decision making through the cloud, predict certain diseases according to geographical locations, food habits, and more.
