Why cloud is crucial for healthcare?

Suresh Venkatachari, Chairman, 8K Miles Software Services elaborates on the manifold advantages of the cloud in offering healthcare firms a secure, agile and cost-effective environment

Traditionally the healthcare industry has been technology-agnostic as it used to rely on conventional IT systems. The aversion to adopt new means of technology in order to streamline operations and systems has for long stymied the process of upgradation in the healthcare field. The basic idea of centralising data in one organised and accessible place has long eluded the healthcare sector.

While revolutionising the very foundation of patient care, adoption of cloud will help the healthcare industry find new avenues to aggregate and consolidate patient data. Physicians and clinicians will be empowered to make better decisions.

According to a study by research firm MarketsandMarkets, the global healthcare cloud computing market is expected to reach $9.48 billion by 2020 from $3.73 Billion in 2015 at a CAGR of 20.5 per cent.

Over the years, healthcare players will increasingly move to cloud in order to cut down on healthcare costs and better the quality of healthcare services. Critical healthcare applications can be hosted on cloud platform in order to increase their accessibility and availability. Apart from that, the following hardware, software and data can also be moved to cloud: email, electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI), picture archiving and communication systems, pharmacy information systems, radiology information systems, laboratory information systems, disaster recovery systems, databases and backup data.

Why healthcare organisations should move to cloud? The advantages are manifold. Cloud-based applications can easily scale up or down in accordance with changes in demand. Cloud allows utmost flexibility as well as accessibility. It lets healthcare firms to a secure, agile, and cost-effective environment.

One of the foremost advantages is with regard to the costs involved. Healthcare organisations can reduce IT costs to a great extent by adopting cloud. Cloud-based software requires lesser resources for development and testing, meaning that fewer resources for maintenance and more robust solutions at a lesser cost. The estimate is that over a period of 10 years, cloud-based applications cost 50 per cent lesser than traditional in-house hosted applications.

A majority of cloud users have seen considerable cost reduction as a result of using cloud-based software and infrastructure. It requires only less development and testing resources, which will cut down on the expenditure for support and maintenance of applications. Studies have shown that cloud-based software can bring down costs by 50 per cent as compared to traditional software applications. Healthcare firms can save time also. Whereas cloud-based software get ready for use within six months, in-house hosted apps will take one to three years to be developed and well tested before deployment.

Cloud also makes data accessibility to doctors who can diagnose and analyse the patients without spending too much time.

Another great advantage is improved efficiency. With cloud organisations need not spend too much on infrastructure. With early access to wide range of data, businesses can gather valuable insights about the performance of systems and plan their future strategy accordingly. Healthcare firms, hospitals and doctors can focus on their core objective – giving the best possible treatment and service to patient – while the cloud service providers take care of their IT needs.

Cloud-based software can be accessed 24×7 from anywhere by any authorized personnel. Apart from that, it is easier to recover from loss in case of natural disasters because of its distributed architecture. The cloud’s resiliency and high availability make it a cost-effective alternative to on-site hosted solutions.

There have been security concerns about cloud computing for a while. Such apprehensions were shared not only by pharma companies but also by other segments also. But today, such fears are allayed by the fact that cloud-hosted data is far more secure than data hosted on site and it is quite accessible. Cloud computing allows applications to run independently of hardware through a virtual environment running out of secure data centers. This allows employees to access same documents and apps anywhere, breaking barriers of geography and converting any place into a virtual ‘office’.

Future of cloud

In the days to come, cloud-based computing will remain as one of the topmost agendas with doctors, hospital managements, and patients seek cost-efficiency, security, and access to information.

As of now cloud is being used to manage business applications to attain financial efficiencies. The relevance of cloud is bound to increase in the days to come as we are heading to an era of virtual care and tele-medicine. IDC predicts that virtual care will become normal by 2018 with the possibility of estimated 70 per cent of routine doctor visits can be effectively managed through telemedicine. It is also predicted that by 2018, Internet of things (IoT) and big data will be the deciding factors in almost 80 per cent of patient service interaction. This will effectively improve quality, value and timeliness. In order to a achieve all these, the healthcare segment needs to adopt healthcare cloud in a big way. Such an adoption is essential to achieve a flexible and highly scalable communications architecture.

This leads to several predictions about emerging trends.

The challenge before healthcare IT professionals is to make the organisation less reliant on capital-intensive technology investments and ensure flexible and scalable solutions. In order to ensure improved outcomes, healthcare companies ensure cash flow-generating activities which in turn will deliver results. The core advantage of cloud computing is that it lets healthcare organisations stay focused on their core competency – that is the healthcare service – instead of worrying over other infrastructural hassles such as data centers, and the required professionals to maintain them.

Future trends

The healthcare industry is increasingly relying on cloud-based computing so that its players will remain collaborative, flexible, and target-focused.

Talking about the trends, in the days to come there will be more patient-clinician interaction on account of cloud. With care increasingly being delivered through wearable technology, mobile, alerts, and other new-age digital means, we can predict more fruitful and effective interactions between physicians and patients.

Another possible trend will be the availability of real-time clinical records. Clarity and transparency will become a reality as both patients and healthcare professionals can access real-time data and health records, allowing the stakeholders to adopt a holistic picture.

Cloud can bring about a virtual health information exchange with democratisation of data. Soon we can expect a scenario where individuals will start taking ownership of their own health and data and start connecting their experiences with government organisations, educational institutions, etc.

These are only a few of the many benefits that cloud computing offers to the healthcare players. There are a lot more a cloud-based technology can contribute in improving a healthcare player’s long-term return on investment and scale operations.