Impact of Cloud Technology on Healthcare
Harnessing the Cloud technology, innovations such as the Electronic Health Record (EHR), Health Information Exchange and Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming indispensable in healthcare. EMR/EHR system in which all patient information is recorded on a single platform, making it accessible from anywhere allows enhanced patient care and improved patient outcomes. Employing Cloud-based solutions for health information storage on standardized system facilitates Health Information Exchange through a secure and stable platform enabling seamless communication and information sharing between different healthcare entities. The Cloud infrastructure also facilitates smooth communication between doctors, patients and researchers leading to better quality of patient care and medical practices catapulting global medical advancement. Integrating medical devices on a single platform, allowing them to communicate with each other, creating an “Internet of Things” (IoT) reduces manual intervention and provides accurate results, eliminating human error.
The architecture supporting multi-tenancy makes it possible to hold multiple organizations with different operations on the same server, while ensuring secure data storage and maintaining the privacy of each entity. This enables different healthcare entities such as hospitals, diagnostic labs, clinical centers, blood banks, insurance companies, medical devices, financial, and accounting departments to operate in tandem. In addition, the Cloud-based implementation offers remote set-up and support, allowing accelerated scalability, making it possible for continued and easy interactions between stakeholders across the globe. Hosting all data on Cloud as opposed to the local servers connecting enterprises allows extensive data analysis using Business Intelligence systems. This helps stakeholders derive actionable intelligence based on aggregated data to create and implement more meaningful and effective business strategies.
Enabling Cloud technology for patient information management at a national level has been a game changer in public health systems. Providing mobile solutions to collect and assimilate data for nationwide disease screening and medical monitoring in rural areas improves the quality of overall healthcare delivery significantly. The availability of real time patient information in a centralized secure platform presents opportunities of performing phenomenal analytics with meaningful business intelligence gathering frameworks such as disease burden, health budget effectiveness, epidemic information, real-time outbreak monitoring, and interventional strategies. This also leads to more efficient resource utilization systems derived from information present in the central database which can be directed more easily to areas where they are needed the most.
The emerging technologies present tremendous opportunities bridging the gap between the urban and rural societies. Telemedicine creates opportunity for many key procedures and expert opinions remotely, breaking geographic barriers. Automation brings down the overall costs making healthcare more affordable and accessible to all.
Cloud technology is rapidly becoming an invaluable part of the healthcare industry and has completely transformed the way medical research is executed. The trends in the field indicate the emergence of new methods of data collection and analysis, leading to a more proactive preventive approach to medicine as opposed to just curing the ailment. Moreover, with the dawn of affordable human genome sequencing coupled with Cloud-based big data analytics as well as the increasing popularity of wearable devices for monitoring the healthcare of individuals, we are nearing the era of personalized medicine. The pivotal role of IT in healthcare is now evident in day-to-day operations of hospitals, diagnostics labs and clinics all over the world. Current research on new information technologies coupled with breakthroughs in patient care and disease diagnostics is going to lead to a new epoch for digital medicine, transforming the quality of human life.