Nowadays, more and more businesses migrate their infrastructure, resources, and data to cloud or hybrid servers. Cloud computing is not a new term now. Over the past few years, the adaptation rate of cloud technology has been increased rapidly. Cloud computing has been here for some time but its overall adoption is a new trend. According to some research, the global market cap of cloud technology in the healthcare system will be increased to USD 25.54 billion during 2020-2024. Moreover, the global pandemic or covid19 has only strengthened this trend. Moreover, the Healthcare industry is also growing and developing to include more modern technologies.
In healthcare, the advantages of cloud computing have been gaining a lot of traction recently. However, it might be part of a strategic vision of including digital transformation or pressing needs due to changes in circumstances. Whatever it is but if done in the correct way, the role of cloud computing can be quite prominent in the healthcare system. Also due to the new norm of social distancing, healthcare has to find new ways for patient-doctor interactions. And, that’s why trends that slowly developed in past, like telehealth now have been sped up exponentially.
In healthcare, Cloud computing advantages work hand-in-hand for both patients and physicians. It reduces cost, facilities better patient care, enhances privacy, and improves collaboration and interoperability. The outcomes of this new technology in the healthcare system are mostly aligned with both doctors and patients. This new era with new payment models and changes in patient expectations. This transforms technology into a crucial factor to improve patient care, eliminate waste, ensure safety, and drive efficiency. Moreover, the healthcare system will continue to use this technology once the crisis subsides. Let’s see the benefits of cloud computing in healthcare.
Advantages of cloud computing for Healthcare
In the healthcare industry, a significant amount of data is generated daily. The democratization of data and remote access of data free up providers and patients, breaking down geographical access make restrictions to healthcare. In healthcare, cloud computing shows the practice of making remote servers accessed via the internet to store, manage and process data and information. Moreover, this removes the need for an on-site data center or hosting data on a personal computer. Cloud offers doctors and hospitals remote access to servers where they can store information and data about patients. After the invention of the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Mandate, healthcare in the United States has adopted a cloud-based solution as a means of storing and protecting patient records.
Moreover, BCC research shows the global healthcare cloud computing market to hit $35 billion by 2022. With a growth rate of 11.6%. However, 69% of respondents in the 2018 survey show that the hospital. Where they worked, did not have a plan for moving their infrastructure to cloud computing. Moreover, the applications are easy to handle when they are based on serverless infrastructure. Instead of investing in your own on-premise data center paying a third party will adequately lower the IT costs. So, let’s take a look at the advantages of cloud computing in healthcare.
Unlimited Capacity
The health care industry always obtains and gets new data about the patient history and medical records. So, it needs huge stores of data and storage capacity to retain information. We have seen this need in the global pandemic of covid19. This is becoming more complicated ad the list of need continue to grow with the increasing amount of data exponentially over time. However, in cloud computing service providers must adapt to growing needs and not the business collecting the data. This is not a problem for hospitals as capacity issues will be taken care of by cloud providers. So, the cloud offers nearly unlimited capacity for healthcare to store all the necessary data and content.
Enhances Patient experience and Safety
With cloud computing in business, doctors, and hospitals can increase patient engagement and give them access to the test results, medical data, and notes from anywhere and anytime. This makes patients more educated about their medical conditions. It also gives power and control to patients. Moreover, cloud computing provides a new high level of security and safety. It helps patients to avoid unnecessary testing and keeps them from being overprescribed. This also allows doctors and hospitals to access the history of patients’ medical records.
EMRs based on the cloud can play an important role to increase patient safety. For example, A mentally unhealthy patient in California visited different hospital emergency rooms and walk-in hospitals hundreds of times over the period of a year. Each time submitting to test and hope to get medical prescriptions. Now, due to cloud EMR solutions in health care, it offers each facility to patients that visited could glean direct insight into interactions with doctors at other places. This removes the chances of overprescribed medications for patients. Which could harm and also save money for hospitals. As they can also avoid subjecting patients to test that is already done by other hospitals.
Enables a Patient-Centric Approach
Giving the right care at right time and right location helps patients and hospitals. Also, Providing access to patients to their health data supports patient-centric goals. However, We can not meet this objective on-site as it does not have flexibility. Generally, cloud computing helps patients manage healthcare, perform health-related tasks, and communicate with hospitals from any internet-connected device. With cloud computing in healthcare patients can do:
- Schedule medical appointments online
- Monitor healthcare charges
- Communicate online or through email
- Search for a hospitals
- Do health-related forms or paperwork
- Send or receive text messages
So, the decoration of data in healthcare removes obstacles to access. This also helps doctors in interactions and provides transparency in pricing. This will increase the trust of patients in healthcare. Moreover, medical data access helps healthcare to retain patients.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Healthcare is the field where AI can be intimidating. The packed schedules of medical professionals and now very much needed as the world continues its fight against the global pandemic. With the rise of data and complexity ML and AI capabilities can be an important solution to help healthcare decisions. Moreover, It is a faster time for treatment. Also, it is not easy for human analysts and laborers to stream over such massive troves of digital content and data or information. However, they do not need to do as we have artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.
More and more cloud platforms integrate ML and AI into data servers and services. So, cloud computing can provide AI and ML into the workstream healthcare and help users to manage lots of data. As this technology is also capable of mining collected data for new insights and detail, it will benefit the healthcare system. For example, PathAI uses technology to aid pathologists in making quicker and more accurate diagnoses. And, Kensci also uses ML to predict illness and treatment patterns.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Big data gives patterns and insights from data of population in healthcare. However, Turning a large amount of data into actionable insights is quite challenging. But, We see that AI and ML are also used with cloud computing. So, we can use cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence tools to make clinical decisions quicker from the information. Hospitals can use big data to improve patient outcomes. It fuels medical research while helping providers to find and respond to public health dangers. Moreover, data analysis based on the cloud offers personalized care plans. Which allows healthcare to focus more on care to individuals.
Enhances Disaster Recovery Efforts
Prevention of data loss is critical. Although, local disasters can make on-site establishments unreachable. The service provider might not have access to patient, caregiver databases, scheduling tools, and data record of patients. Every second of downtime can result in poor experiences or patient results. Cloud computing provides secure access to data and information. During or after the disaster, it needs minimal effort to recover or process data. However, the service provider also provides tools for automatic backups and data security. With the elimination of IT problems, healthcare can focus more on patient recovery efforts and patient care.
Remote Care Opportunities
Nowadays, due to the global pandemic, remote culture is improvised and accepted worldwide. As the data and computing power is all remote, the system can be accessed with any platform that has internet access including any smart devices. This makes support available to a wide range of platforms, creates a large number of remote care opportunities. Hospitals, doctors, and nurses can manage events and provide care from anywhere in the world. With these new opportunities, it makes more accurate and far-reaching healthcare. Imagine an on-site doctor being able to cure all their patient and able to manage remotely. Or a specialist will be able to do a procedure from halfway across the world using remote care technologies. This type of remote care modern technology is called telehealth. It is becoming more and more prominent in the field.
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