The Importance of AWS Cloud Computing for the Healthcare Industry

Fun fact: On average, about 80% of the IT budget is used for “keeping the lights on,” and only 20% is spent helping to grow the organization. That large amount of spending should be bringing back bigger value to organizational operations and that is exactly what cloud technology offers. Life sciences companies, as well as healthcare companies all over the world, are creating better outcomes and overall experiences for their patients by using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Using AWS has plenty of benefits such as saving physical space because of the backup servers in the cloud, saving money due to archiving that is affordable and offering new ways to handle patients’ information. These benefits in more detail are explained below:

Increasing collaboration of providers

More and more organizations are making the move towards payment that is value-based on care. Value-based care is a model for payment that pays doctors as well as the hospitals that are treating patients at the necessary time and place as well as giving the patient the necessary amount of care. It can be considered an incentive that motivates the providers of healthcare to meet the performance measures that are put in place to uphold efficiency as well as the quality of the process.

This has led to the increase in the need for collaboration between the medical departments, doctors as well as medical institutions in general. AWS comes in handy here in that it allows the transfer of data from whichever point it needs to be transferred to the needed endpoint through the cloud computing server. This in the end leads to a boost in the cooperation between services and therefore better treatment.

Incorporating new technology improves product development and care delivery

If you are in the healthcare and wellness business then you know how important it is that you ought to allow your organization to be more focused on delivering optimum care on experiences as well as outcomes for patients, while spending less on the building as well as maintenance of the data infrastructure.

AWS has managed features that have been able to offer new ways for the healthcare customers and the life sciences to efficiently connect with the distributors, suppliers, providers as well as patients. There are capabilities such as the code-triggered functionality which allows reports to be customized and notifications to be personalized. This transforms the value chain such that the number of patients getting better and faster is increased.

The clinicians, researchers, manufacturing, and operations teams are empowered by the data analytics allowing them to make decisions that are more informed and beneficial to the enterprise. Personalized engagement, clinical forecasting, advanced product, and clinical research are all supported by ML.

Managing data more effectively

AWS stands by the motto that the kind of data you have is not as relevant or important as what you do with it. AWS has several options where you can collect insights from all the data you collect and store. Managing your data more efficiently starts with being able to get your data seamlessly and quickly into the cloud. Having AWS means your system for data management does exactly what you want it to do because it offers configurations that are customized and hybrid as well.

Consequently, for the users that means that their access will be secure and easy owing to the safeguards that are in place that ensure security for the users’ data as well as the identity of the users. Another feature is that you can easily search metadata, and therefore use tools like prescriptive and predictive analytics that enable the identification of trends as well as the development of new insights.  Another feature that you get from AWS is that it allows the segmentation of data. This is to means that you have the option to create separate storages for the active data, the data that is not accessed frequently as well as the archived data.

AWS also supports HITRUST, FedRAMP, HIPPA, and other various requirements of compliance, with services that are specifically designed to match up to the industry standards globally.

Machine Learning and AI

Artificial Intelligence has proved to be intimidating especially in the industry of healthcare. However, with the normal schedules of the medical professionals being tight and more so during these times where the world is in a fight with a pandemic as well as the rise of data complexity, the learning of AI is crucial to offer support to the treatment of patients and ensure a faster time for treatment.

Cloud computing comes in handy in this case as it integrates AI as well as ML in their services, therefore, making the transition concerning Artificial Intelligence into the operations of healthcare easy and also aiding users in the management of the large amounts of data that they handle on a day to day basis.

Supporting regulatory compliance

AWS is known to deliver an environment that is built for the organizations that are considered the world’s most secure ones. The infrastructure it offers is that of the standards for stringent security that are used in the military as well as banking. AWS has a large set of tools for different purposes such as identity management, networking, encryption as well as regulatory compliance.

Attacks that are often sophisticated and hard to identify are often caused by data security being insufficient, availability as well as compliance. AWS continually refines its security measures based on the experiences of the customers.

Scalability

Scalability gives AWS an advantage over the self-hosted models. Cloud computing enables healthcare institutions to be flexible in the sense of increasing or decreasing the storage of data based on the flow of patients. Through this, the healthcare institutions are then in a position to adopt the technologies to cater to the peak seasons. An example of the peak seasons is the flu season in which the volume of patients usually is quite high. Adapting technology to peak seasons will ensure that there will be minimal to no wastage of money or time as the enterprise will use the latest hardware modifications as well as the latest software updates.

Conclusion

The healthcare industry is moving to the cloud rapidly, and the needed resources for your journey to be accelerated are all provided by AWS. Other than direct support, AWS gives you connection with consulting as well as technology partners who have expertise in a vast range of different applications.  It is therefore safe to say that the time has come to rethink the role of IT in healthcare in a way that reduces complexity and increases efficiency through AWS.