Cloud and Healthcare in times of a pandemic
In the testing times, lets explore Cloud Computing and its application in the healthcare sector. I hope it brings about an understanding of the transformation of the industry brought by the Cloud.
The challenges faced by healthcare particularly are countless patient records, developing the infrastructure to connect hospitals, surgeries and clinics. Integrating information also becomes particularly difficult. Cloud computing particularly solves all these problems. Cloud has the capability to provide a decentralised approach to it and improve the patient experience at much lower costs.
Healthcare industry has particularly seen a shift from conventional storage of data to digitalisation. Cloud computing in healthcare provides two fold benefits both to the customer as well as to the patients. It reduces the operational expenses while it provides personalised care to the patients.
Cloud briefly has the following distinct advantages:
- Cost Effectiveness: Hospitals and healthcare no longer need to purchase hardware and servers. There are no charges specifically for storage of data in Cloud. This is a massive reduction in costs. Cloud also gives you the advantage of scalability. Patient’s data is collected through multiple sources, thus cloud proves to be one of the best environments while keeping the costs in check.
- Data Integration: Data integration through cloud computing, helps the data to be available quickly in order to facilitate the healthcare planning process. It helps in integrating the data about the patient collated from various sources, shared with important stakeholders for timely treatment of the patient. It also diminishes the limitations of geographic limitations.
- Remote Accessibility of data: Remote accessibility of data is a crucial advantage that Cloud offers. It helps in supporting important healthcare functions like post hospitalisation care plans.
- Analytics: This is one of the most important aspects of cloud computing. Performing analytics on a patient’s data helps to store critical information about the medical history of the patient. This can be extracted whenever required.
The above advantages have changed the way cloud computing has revolutionised the industry of healthcare. Cloud computing has improved the clinical productivity through data transparency, streamlined operations and support facilities, improved patient care with enhanced analytics and also driven revenue through personalised patient experiences.
Cloud computing, no doubt, has paved the way during Covid-19.
Several players in the cloud industry have contributed significantly to battle against the Covid-19.
We wanted to enlist the work of the top 3 public cloud providers:-
- Amazon Web Services
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
GE’s Mural virtual-care technology has been designed to monitor the ventilated population in hospitals powered by Microsoft Azure cloud platform. This helps in surveillance of Multi-site intensive care units as well and real time data is aggregated of the patient’s condition. GE has described partnering with a cloud platform has made it scalable and affordable. Remoter monitoring has become a key aspect in these testing times fighting the pandemic.
Google Cloud has created a dedicated healthcare API to improve data interoperability and give real-time data access to health data of the patient. It allows healthcare organisations to manage data from systems and provides friendly data interaction. It has also worked with YouTube, Google Maps Platform to allow the stakeholders to navigate the pandemic.
Amazon Web Services is connecting with stakeholders all around the world to cope with the effects of Covid-19. Covid-19 dataset from John Hopkins is available on AWS data set. AWS has also launched HPC to provide for diagnosis, treatment and vaccine studies.
All the cloud players in the industry are contributing in crucial ways towards fighting the virus. Through the citations above, it is implicit that — Cloud is playing one of the most important roles in these tough times as well and it becomes difficult to imagine a world without cloud now.