For both patients and doctors, the advantages of cloud computing in healthcare frequently go hand in hand. The advantages of using cloud technologies for healthcare cloud security include decreased costs, improved privacy, and the facilitation of better patient care through collaboration and interoperability, to name a few. In the case of cloud computing, patient results and healthcare providers’ business outcomes are largely in line.
What Does Healthcare Cloud Computing Entail?
Using distant servers that individuals can access online to store, manage, and process patient data is what we know as cloud computing in the healthcare industry. It is the opposite of setting up a server-equipped data center on-site or hosting the data on a personal computer.
Healthcare providers and hospitals can use a network of remotely accessible servers to store vast amounts of data in a secure environment that is under management by IT specialists thanks to the customizable solution that cloud storage provides.
Healthcare businesses all around the United States have embraced cloud-based healthcare solutions as a means of storing and preserving patient records ever since the introduction of the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Mandate. The global healthcare cloud computing industry is to reach $35 billion by 2022, with an annualized growth rate of 11.6%, according to BCC research.
Despite this, according to 69% of survey participants, their hospital does not have a plan for migrating current data centers to the cloud. What advantages can cloud computing provide the healthcare sector, then? This article explores the following 7 major advantages.
Efficient Electronic Medical Record-Keeping Through Cloud Storage in Healthcare
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act included the federal mandate for electronic medical records, which became effective on January 1st, 2014. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities should show that they are using electronic medical records meaningfully to save data about patient contacts.
The objectives of cloud computing in the medical profession are to enhance the quality, security,
and effectiveness of healthcare services, as well as to engage patients and families more effectively, enhance care coordination, and protect patient privacy. Today, the vast majority of hospitals and healthcare facilities no longer maintain patient records on paper and instead use cloud storage for healthcare. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals update electronic health records that the cloud stores.
Healthcare Cloud Storage Makes Collaborative Patient Care Straightforward
The process of collaborative patient care in America is growing with the adoption of cloud storage for electronic medical data. Doctors can more easily collaborate on viewing or sharing patient medical records because of cloud storage. Historically, each doctor, specialist, or hospital a patient visited probably had a separate file of their medical records. It was extremely challenging for doctors to work together on the patient’s care because of this.
It is now much easier for doctors to share information with one another. Observe the outcomes of interactions between other doctors and the patient. While providing care that fully takes into account what the patient has previously experienced with other doctors. All thanks to the widespread use of cloud storage in hospitals, particularly as it relates to electronic health records.
Cloud Computing in Healthcare Lowers the Cost of Data Storage
Setting up on-site storage necessitates an initial hardware expenditure. This includes buying hard drives to store data and additional IT infrastructure to keep that data safe and available constantly. Healthcare organizations can cut their initial expenditures and concentrate on what they do best: providing patient care. Cloud-based healthcare solution providers take care of the administration, development, and maintenance of cloud data storage services.
Cloud Computing for Healthcare Provides Superior Data Security
In the past, doctors who kept reams of patient records in filing cabinets were at a high risk of data loss or corruption. Paper records are readily lost in an event of a natural disaster by the absence of security surrounding these records. This seriously jeopardizes the patient’s safety.
Once the EMR mandate was in place, healthcare providers were free to build their own internal data storage infrastructure; but, in order to protect patient data, this step would again need the retention of IT personnel with data security expertise.
Healthcare providers now have an alternative in the form of outsourcing data protection and archiving to HIPAA-compliant cloud storage services. These providers offer patient EMR data storage that conforms with statutory mandates for data security and privacy. Every healthcare practitioner now has access to a data storage option that will appropriately safeguard sensitive patient data thanks to “the cloud.”
Cloud Computing in Healthcare Opens the Door to Big Data Applications
There are now more prospects for “big data” applications to improve patient outcomes. All thanks to the growing adoption of cloud-based data storage systems in the healthcare industry.
In the past, medical professionals in the US maintained paper patient records. The amount of potentially helpful data in patient EMRs was always enormous. This data could be used to forecast when an epidemic might break out; to find minute patterns in patient illnesses that could help identify the underlying causes of illness, or to determine which treatments were most successful for a particular set of symptoms.
All of the data that was previously locked away in filing cabinets can now be searched through and analyzed. The analysis is carried out by using the most sophisticated computer algorithms. Moreover, healthcare professionals will now be able to identify and address hazards to the public’s health that would previously go undetected until far later in their life cycles.
Healthcare Cloud Computing Improves Patient Safety
EMRs that the cloud hosts have huge potential to improve patient safety. For instance, over the course of a year, a mentally ill patient in California made hundreds of trips to various hospital emergency departments and walk-in clinics—submitting to testing each time and hoping to get medicine prescriptions. Healthcare professionals at each facility the patient visited were able to gain direct insight into interactions between the patient and doctors at other facilities. This was due to the deployment of cloud EMR technology.
The hospitals were able to avoid submitting the patient to tests that she had just undergone at other facilities. Thus, saving the patient from being over-prescribed medications that may have seriously harmed her.
The Use of Cloud Computing in Future Medical Research
Future medical researchers will greatly benefit from the digitalization of healthcare information through cloud-based data storage. Cloud computing will allow healthcare providers to use big data analytics in the management of their facilities.
Along with the accumulation of enormous data sets; the cloud enables medical researchers to access enormous computational capacity that was previously out of reach.
