From Data Centers to Patient Care: The Cloud’s Impact on Healthcare Efficiency

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Ivan Kuzlo Engineering Director

Cloud computing is one of the most interesting pieces of technology available today. The first discussions about the concept began in the early 1960s – and today, almost 60 years later, cloud technology is commonplace.

It was only a matter of time before cloud computing would make its way to the healthcare sector. Nowadays, we see widespread adoption of cloud technologies by healthcare and wellness  providers. So, let’s dive into cloud computing and learn how it’s utilized in today’s industry.

Understanding Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Cloud computing means providing users with computing services over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Such services can vary depending on the user’s needs, from storing information to providing access to software. 

When the pandemic pushed everyone back into their homes, cloud computing started to gain more popularity in the healthcare sector. In 2021, the global healthcare cloud computing market was worth 39.1 billion USD. This number is estimated to grow to $102.3 billion USD by 2028. 

This market growth is due to advancements in cloud security and AI integration, which have led more healthcare and wellness businesses to consider adopting innovations. 

The market data correlates with the healthcare analytics data we at CHI Software collected ourselves. Not so long ago, we conducted a survey of healthcare organizations and wellness businesses. One of the questions we asked was: which technology trend is transforming your business?

As you can see, 23% of respondents answered that cloud-based solutions and ecosystems are transforming their businesses. This leads us to the conclusion that we experience a steady growth in cloud computing adoption. But is it as good as people say?

What Cloud Infrastructure for Healthcare Brings to the Table

Cloud technology benefits healthcare in various ways: 

Cost-effectiveness

Before the wide adoption of cloud computing technology, businesses had to have on-premise data centers. These data centers require constant maintenance to provide computing power, storage, and other resources. Needless to say, this wasn’t the cheapest solution, but since there were no alternatives, it was the only choice businesses had.  

Contrary to on-site servers, cloud computing enables businesses to enjoy all the power of data centers without the cost of maintaining them. Businesses only pay for the cloud-based infrastructure and computing resources they use.

Increased speed and agility

Picture this: your healthcare business wants to adopt new software. To do that, you need to send a request to the IT department, configure hardware to support new software, purchase said software, and then install it. The whole process can take months! 

With cloud computing, healthcare IT efficiency can reach a whole other level. You don’t need to worry about tweaking hardware to support new software. All you need to do is purchase and install the software on your cloud, and that’s it – you’re ready to go without waiting.

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Unlimited scalability

With physical servers, scalability is the question of how much hardware your business can afford to buy. If you want your business to scale up operations, you must provide enough hardware to match the desired scale. 

This comes with additional software expenses and a higher maintenance cost, which is less than optimal for any health IT infrastructure, to say the least. 

With cloud computing, however, it’s only a matter of purchasing additional computating power. On top of that, as soon as you don’t need it, you don’t need to be stuck with a bunch of useless hardware – you can simply reduce your cloud services needs and save money. 

Enhanced strategic value

The healthcare industry is often a pioneer in adopting new technologies. In our survey, almost 40% of respondents answered that implementing complex technological solutions is important for their businesses. 

While innovation is always a good thing, your business might struggle to adapt to changes. Thankfully, cloud computing is here to help.

With cloud computing, you can try out any new solution without changing your existing working environment. One of the examples of such technologies is AI. 

While AI promises to benefit healthcare immensely, it might be hard to train and store AI models on your business’ local servers. This problem is easily mitigated by cloud computing – since you can train and store AI in the cloud.

As a leader in AI expertise, we at CHI Software know how effective it is to pair AI and cloud computing for healthcare and wellness businesses. Contact our experts if healthcare AI consulting is something your business is looking for.

To summarize, cloud infrastructure for healthcare brings a lot of value to offer. We know it first-hand – many of our projects used cloud technologies. Let’s open our portfolio and check them out.

Use Cases of Cloud Computing in Healthcare

The healthcare industry can utilize cloud computing in a variety of ways. We have compiled examples of cloud-based healthcare solutions from all over the world to showcase how they work in the real-world environment.

Fitness App Powered by Cloud Computing

During the COVID pandemic, there was a problem with social interaction between people, and our client aimed to solve this issue. As a leading US healthcare startup, they saw a need for people to have space to socialize while exercising.  

They turned an idea into an app. However, they had trouble with creating one of the important features, so they contacted us to do it. This is the story of how the leaderboard by location was born.

Instead of just listing every app user, the leaderboard changes based on the location and additional settings. For example, the user can adjust the leaderboard to show only people from their neighborhood, work, city, or whole state. 

To implement this feature, we decided to leverage our knowledge of cloud computing and our AWS partnership to create a serverless system that can be adjusted in seconds. 

Cloud-based healthcare applications are always a treat for us to work on. We had our shining moment to showcase our cloud computing skills, and users got a quality feature that helped them stay connected even in daring times. 

To learn more about this project, you can read our extensive case study. In the meantime, let’s move on to the next solution.

How We Created Remote Monitoring Software Using Cloud Computing

Every parent in the world is concerned about their child’s safety. One of our clients, a US-based startup producing IoT solutions for childcare, decided to provide parents with much-needed ease in mind. They contacted us with an idea to develop a remote nursery monitoring app. 

In their vision, the solution would act as a control hub, allowing parents to manage and monitor their baby’s nursery. We decided to expand on it by integrating with various smart home devices, smartphones, laptops, wearable tech, etc. This integration is seamless, meaning parents can always stay connected from any location.

As you can probably guess by now, this solution heavily relies on cloud computing. We used various AWS services to ensure seamless connection and smart house integration support. The result is an innovative all-in-one app filled to the brim with features:

• Remote monitoring of the child’s activities via video cameras;
• Notifications about the child’s current state;
• Reports on the child’s activities and overall health state;
• Stats and graphs for better statistics understanding;
• Timer to schedule activation of various smart house appliances;
• Settings to adjust the app for a comfortable user experience. 

The project is still ongoing but has already shown promising results. Our client reports a 15% in user engagement and a 10% increase in parent satisfaction. 

To learn more about this project, be sure to read our case study. Let’s cover some more use cases of cloud computing in healthcare.

Pfizer’s Trial Testing and Cloud Computing

Not so long ago, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer collaborated with Amazon to create cloud-based solutions for accelerating clinical trial testing.

Pfizer utilized Amazon’s SageMaker, which can build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models that process equipment data to detect anomalies, predict maintenance needs, and reduce equipment downtime. 

In addition, Pfizer collaborates with Amazon’s AWS to extract information from a vast dataset of legacy documents containing insights about drug development and analytical tests. 

Microsoft Introduces Mercy to Cloud Computing

Mercy Hospital network is among the top 20 largest US health systems. In 2023, they announced a partnership with Microsoft to create a platform that would improve patient care and experiences.

Mercy plans to use Microsoft’s cloud services with Azure OpenAI to improve care in two key ways:

• Providing patients with helpful information so that they can better understand their lab results and participate in informed discussions with doctors;
• Using generative AI to answer patient’s calls and create personalized recommendations.

The tools Microsoft provides to Mercy allow them to experiment with AI and create a cloud-based solution that will help patients and doctors alike.

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Bayer’s Radiology Practices and Cloud Computing

Bayer, based in Germany, is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Recently, they announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to create AI solutions that aim to help radiologists in their work.

Bayer was already developing a platform for further development of AI-powered solutions, but they quickly hit the wall. This is because, to develop such a big platform, they needed to scale their operations. Luckily, Google Cloud decided to help out. They provided access to their generative AI tools, as well as cloud services.

The platform’s ultimate goal is to provide radiologists with supportive tools for analyzing large amounts of medical data. 

Securing Patient Information in the Healthcare Cloud: Our Insights

In our recent survey, we asked representatives of healthcare and wellness businesses a question: what is the biggest challenge that currently hinders the growth of the telehealth tech and wellness industries? 

Almost 45% of respondents are concerned about data privacy and security. And it’s no wonder – the importance of data security in healthcare cannot be overstated. Patient data must be constantly protected to prevent malicious attacks.

Some businesses might think that having on-premise servers is more secure than utilizing cloud computing, but in reality, it’s not that simple. Contrary to popular belief, the closer the data is to the victim, the easier it is for the hacker to steal it. 

Here, we gathered a few of our insights that will help your business enhance security while using cloud services.

Understand existing regulations

Healthcare businesses must comply with the laws and regulations of the country they operate in. For example, American businesses must comply with HIPAA regulations, while European healthcare businesses must comply with GDPR. 

When adopting cloud computing, you need to confirm that the cloud provider complies with regulations as well. 

Encrypt your data and monitor it

Data encryption is one of the ways to protect sensitive data both in transit and storage, which is especially important when working with cloud services.

Encryption serves as a foundation for another security measure – access control. It allows businesses to determine which information will be accessible to individual users. These basic principles of healthcare data management in the cloud ensure the necessary data safety.

Provide backups

No matter how good your security is, you will always need a backup that continuously copies existing files in case of data loss. Furthermore, you need to have a recovery plan to make use of this backup in the event of a data disaster. 

Thanks to cloud computing, creating and storing backups has become much easier. It also assures that you can access the data even after natural disasters and loss of physical hardware.

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Conduct audits

Auditing has always been important in the healthcare industry, and with the addition of cloud computing, you need to adapt the way you conduct it. 

A good call would be to monitor data too. This will help you evaluate your business’ compliance with regulations and make your internal controls more effective. 

Based on our expertise, we believe that dedicated auditing frameworks are superior to plain logging. These frameworks will provide comprehensive data monitoring, even if your business uses multiple cloud-based services.  

Train your staff

When it comes to security, the most vulnerable part of the system is always the human. This is why you need to train your staff constantly. Training ensures that the weakest link in the chain is familiar with the importance of security, and how to deal with threats.

Major cloud providers usually offer extensive documentation and learning resources to make this process easier. 

Healthcare cloud service providers often supply businesses with seminars on cybersecurity, promoting knowledge sharing and ensuring everyone understands cybersecurity’s importance.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is already everywhere. It’s a powerful technology that shines bright in the healthcare industry. Cloud computing has opened up a lot of potential for creative solutions that can help people in new ways.

If you are interested in adopting cloud computing into your work processes, you need a team of developers. But not just any team – a team of experts! 

We at CHI Software have over ten years of cloud expertise and we provide ISO-certified services. And if it wasn’t enough – we’re also partners of AWS and Microsoft. So, there’s no reason to wait further – contact us today!

About the author

Ivan Kuzlo Engineering Director

Ivan keeps a close eye on all engineering projects at CHI Software, making sure everything runs smoothly. The team performs at their best and always meets their deadlines under his watchful leadership. He creates a workplace where excellence and innovation thrive.