The medical services sector is gradually adapting cloud computing technologies to its sphere. This happens because modern world medicine, adhering to the main goal – patient care – formulates a key requirement for improving the quality of medical services and improving clinical results (and therefore for improving the quality of life of a particular person and its prolongation): quick access to patient information regardless of the location of the patient and the medic. Today, cloud technologies have a tangible potential to meet this requirement.
What is Cloud Сomputing?
Cloud сomputing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet – including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics. These services are divided into three main categories or types of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).
What is Cloud Computing in Healthcare?
Cloud computing in healthcare provides a connected, accessible, and collaborative environment for patients and clinicians. In the long run, pivoting to a cloud environment ensures lower costs and more satisfaction among patients and medical staff. Cloud storage offers a flexible solution that allows healthcare professionals and hospitals to leverage a network of remotely accessible servers where they can store large volumes of data in a secure environment that is maintained by IT professionals.
How does Cloud Computing impact the healthcare industry?
Cloud computing impacts the healthcare industry massively. From reducing the cost of care to improving communication with patients and the quality of treatment – the importance of cloud computing in healthcare is huge; they make a
massive positive impact on companies and clinics and have a lot of significant benefits.
Top benefits of Cloud Computing in Healthcare:
Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources.
Cost
Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters – the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, and the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. Cloud computing is easier and saves the company significant funds, which means reducing the cost of services, improving medical equipment for diagnosis, etc.
Accessibility
Healthcare companies are complex organizations, and usually, more than one physician or team works with one patient. Conveying up-to-date patient data without additional communication is quite complicated and resource-intensive. Thanks to cloud services, data can be updated in real-time, and each specialist can access and update it if they have permission.
Speed
Healthcare companies operate with data like patients’ contacts and personal information, medical and appointment history, info about the insurance company, payments records. It isn’t easy to structure and process it manually. Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks.
Security
Since the healthcare industry always deals with data like diagnostics, lab tests, medical history, billing records, and more, its loss can cause irreparable damage to the company. Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies, and controls that strengthen security posture overall, helping protect data, apps, and infrastructure from potential threats.
Examples of Cloud Computing in healthcare system
Cloud computing sphere is growing so fast that total global spending is estimated to reach $500 billion by the end of 2022, with a global market value at over $89 billion by 2027.
Many healthcare organizations have already started to adopt cloud computing in healthcare management processes. Here are the most prominent examples of cloud services for healthcare companies:
Carecloud — practice management and EHR software help healthcare providers to improve their efficiency and enable them to connect directly with patients.
Nintex simplifies the manual processes, especially with documentation. It strengthens the overall patient experience and provides automation services to healthcare industry experts.
NetApp is a hybrid cloud data services company. It delivers data in real-time to make clinical processes faster and more efficient through quicker backup and restoration and easier adaption of data growth.
Conclusion
Digital healthcare uses the latest information and communication technologies to develop and support faster, more efficient and cost-effective medical practice. This technological transformation of healthcare has become a global trend. The main tasks here are: increasing the availability, comfort, and quality of medical care for people around the world; timely, accurate diagnostics; in-depth medical analytics; getting rid of routine for doctors.
It is possible now to solve these problems with the help of high technologies only with the use of the allocation of serious computing power and technical support of IT specialists, which have become available to organizations of any scale and direction of medicine only thanks to cloud services.
Altabel Group has experience in developing projects with Cloud Сomputing both in the medical field and in other popular areas. If you are interested in the details ‒ you can feel free to contact us for detailed information, references, and advice on your project.
Darya Mashevskaya
Business Development Manager
