Healthcare IT Boost – Make the Move to the Cloud

When it comes to advancing technology, the healthcare industry is dragging its feet. Why is this?

Although a majority of healthcare organizations have adopted cloud technology, some still lag behind in the migration due to the lack of technically trained personnel to implement and manage cloud storage. As with most new things, it takes time to master and become confident in using it.

As the new year continues to unfold, two of the biggest obstacles Healthcare IT leaders have had about cloud migration is security and ROI from their current IT infrastructure. They also noticed other benefits that they cannot get with on-site storage management.

Is Your Health Data Secure in the Cloud?

In a manner of speaking, yes. People have very real reasons for being apprehensive. Cyberattacks are a real concern for healthcare providers due to the increase in population and the number of attacks per year. That could mean tens of thousands of dollars lost to a security breach. It’s a valid concern.

Although the internet makes it more susceptible to cyber attacks, there is more security in the healthcare cloud infrastructure.

Public cloud infrastructure providers dedicate numerous resources to secure their environments, and it is much more than hospitals or individual health organizations alone could do. Cloud teams focus solely on security, while health systems have to focus on multiple areas, like hiring IT professionals, managing the systems, and so far have had a hard time keeping up.

IT Infrastructure and ROI

As it was mentioned previously, healthcare IT leaders had obstacles regarding IT infrastructure and ROI. Chief information officers (CIOs) spend a significant number of hours building elaborate data centers, recruiting IT professionals, and acquiring resources that they’re reluctant to give up on in favor of the cloud.

While they are not ready to jump on the bandwagon just yet, they are realizing that they can make many more improvements and solve more problems for their organizations, rather than the underlying IT infrastructure. Improving workflows, reducing errors, and making processes more efficient yield a much better return on investment (ROI) than focusing on the IT infrastructure.

Securing data is a costly process. Unfortunately, CIOs are under constant pressure to make things work and streamline the processes to be more efficient.  They’re picking their brains and asking the question, “How can we do this more cost-effectively?” And the answer that keeps coming up is in the Healthcare cloud infrastructure.

Increased  Innovation

One benefit of the cloud infrastructure is that applications can be built faster to leverage all the services being offered. The cloud offers innovation and features not available elsewhere. Cloud technology offers advances that will help automate a lot of the more mundane tasks and speed up machine learning through software programs and internal frameworks.  Building something like this from scratch would take a long time to reach maturity and full functionality.

Elasticity in the Cloud

In the past, hospitals and healthcare managers had to make do with outdated and inefficient record-keeping systems because that is all that was available. Cloud-based systems were non-existent and nothing else was capable of handling large volumes of information being recorded and stored.

When it comes to hospitals and healthcare centers, the amount of data processed in a day between the messages going back and forth between doctors and nurses, doctors and patients, and keeping track of every patient and their appointments, medical histories, and other important information, requires an infrastructure that can handle high volumes.

The benefits of cloud-based systems are that it is cost-effective, meaning that you only pay for what you use. In periods of downtime, you can lower your requirements to use less and raise them when the volume rises again. This lowers the actual cost of ownership, fluctuating only slightly for actual use.

The healthcare cloud infrastructure can benefit from a hybrid environment. It’s not an all-or-none solution — a lot of elements can be combined to offer more services and reach the populations that need healthcare services. Cloud technology continues to expand and grow, meaning it continues to mature, allowing for more health IT solutions. The industry is growing at the same time, so it is very likely we’ll see a lot of hybrid systems working together to solve a lot of modern problems.