Cloud Computing Promises to Improve Healthcare Services

As a student of Johns Hopkins University, I get exposed to various aspects of healthcare almost everyday in all of my classes. Additionally, healthcare has been a subject of interest for all relevant magazines, newspapers and blogs because of the introduction of President Obama's Universal Healthcare law. Thus whenever I encounter a new technological innovation, I tend to be curious about its impact on healthcare industry. In this post, I will try to reveal how healthcare industry can leverage benefits of cloud computing to improve patient care and to make healthcare more affordable.

In my second post titled " Why Should MBA Students Pay Attention to Cloud Computing", I have introduced the concept of readiness of various industries towards adopting cloud computing. ICD estimates that (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/features/2012/IDC_Cloud_jobs_White_Paper.pdf)
healthcare industry would be slow in adopting cloud computing because of regulations and security measures. But healthcare reform is expected to push the industry to look for ways to reduce the cost of healthcare. Thus experts believe that in the near future, acceptance of cloud computing in the healthcare industry will see a positive growth.

In fact, Accenture reports that (http://newsroom.accenture.com/images/20020/HealthcareCloud.pdf) 32% healthcare respondents are currently using cloud computing in some form.

The same report mentions that 73% of cloud users in healthcare industry plan to move more applications to cloud in the near future.

Before I get into the particular benefits that cloud computing promises to bring into healthcare industry, let me show you some videos where experts discuss impacts of cloud computing on healthcare industry. the first video is a cartoon that explains some of the benefits of cloud computing.

Here is another one where experts from both the ICT field and healthcare field explains the benefits and usage:

So as you can see, people in healthcare sector are not only aware of cloud computing, they are interested in the technology and are exploring various aspects of the technology before they can decide to adopt it.

Potential Benefits for Healthcare Industry

• Healthcare databases are characterized by the presence of fragmented, redundant and inconsistent data. Cloud computing can provide better database management that would lead to higher quality of patient information and better update processes.(http://newsroom.accenture.com/images/20020/HealthcareCloud.pdf )

• Effectiveness of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) has been low (http://www.johnseelybrown.com/cloudcomputingdisruption.pdf ) because it was primarily driven by demand of the healthcare providers, had a high cost of implementation, generated low ROI, demanded high level of change management and was characterized by technological challenges such as integration difficulties and security and privatization. Cloud computing can change the scenario by introducing collaboration among participants, high performance, ease of usage and open standards into the system. These phenomena will accommodate demand  of proactive consumers, attend to wellness and chronic illness management, facilitate share management of care for aging parents/relatives and would improve patient safety. 

• Cloud computing will also be able to facilitate collaboration among different systems of different healthcare organizations that in turn would lead to efficient information sharing among organizations. This would lead to better care for patients. 

• The three most important benefits of cloud computing that we have already discussed in the first post of this blog are cost reduction, enhancement of the speed of the operating process and flexibility or on-demand scalability that are generic to all industries and healthcare is not an exception.

Accenture (http://newsroom.accenture.com/images/20020/HealthcareCloud.pdf) provides the example of Pathwork Diagnostics, a developer of diagnostic tests. Pathwork helps oncologists identify hard-to-find tumors. It uses a machine learning algorithm to match the specimen of a tumor with the specimens of other tumors, specifications of which  are stored in a very large library. This process is extremely time consuming and can take months to complete using a mid-level server. Thus Pathwork opted for cloud computing that enabled on-demand scalability for the company. 

• Small hospitals and nursing homes usually do not have an extensive IT infrastructure and cannot afford enough IT stuff to maintain their existing IT needs or to integrate new IT innovations. For such organizations, cloud computing will prove to be a great enabler by providing all such facilities that won'e need to be maintained in-house. 

• In the article titled " A cloud computing solution for patient's data collection in health care institutions". Rolim et al. introduced a cloud based system (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222190/ ) that enables automation of the process that collects vital patient data via a network of sensors which are connected to legacy medical devices. The main benefit of the system is that it eliminates manual data collection and enables real-time data collection under all circumstances. 

• Another obvious benefit of cloud computing is that it enables physicians to access patient data anytime and anywhere through mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. 

• Cloud computing potentially can provide unlimited computing power. Thus diagnosis of various illnesses, human genome sequencing, image analysis, drawing analogies among different genomes, identifying pathogens etc. using cloud computing is cost effective, reliable and fast. The bioinformatic research sector has been the early adopter of cloud computing to leverage such benefits. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222190/)

Thus it is evident that healthcare industry can benefit tremendously by adopting cloud computing. So why don't we see widespread adoption of cloud computing among healthcare providers? The providers are still concerned about data security in the cloud. They also do not trust the cloud service providers to protect the privacy of the patients. Government regulations in the healthcare arena are extremely strict and sometimes providers do not possess enough knowledge about the minute details of such regulations. Thus healthcare providers tends to be extremely cautious so that they do not break any law unintentionally. Healthcare sector is also characterized by loss of governance and organizational inertia (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222190/) that keep them away from introducing technological change in their systems. 

But its not all bad news. The scenario is changing over time as healthcare industry has been witnessing other sectors adopting cloud computing. Such strategies of other sectors encourage the healthcare providers to explore benefits and relevance of cloud computing. The following video discusses the change in attitude  of healthcare providers towards cloud computing:

Let me finish this post by saying that the penetration of cloud computing in healthcare sector is inevitable. Because of the traditional characteristic of the sector, the adoption rate might be slow. But the benefits of cloud computing are too obvious for healthcare providers to ignore.