Overview:
Cloud computing has reshaped the healthcare landscape, offering numerous benefits. It facilitates secure and cost-effective storage of electronic health records (EHRs) and enables remote consultations. Cloud-based analytics empower data-driven decision-making and advance medical research. Scalability ensures that healthcare providers can adapt to changing demands seamlessly.
The cloud's integration into healthcare represents a transformative shift with immense potential for improved patient outcomes and enhanced operational efficiency.
How Cloud Solutions Are Transforming Healthcare:
As per McKinsey, cloud capabilities have the potential to generate value of $100bn to $170bn by 2030 for healthcare companies. The major driver of this value lies in enabling healthcare providers to more effectively innovate, digitize and realize their strategic objectives.
Healthcare providers are extremely cost-conscious because they are under constant pressure to improve patient care while maintaining profitability. Cloud solutions support this by reducing the costs of in-house IT infrastructure. Cloud computing also greatly reduces the time required to deploy software, which can take months in on-premises deployments. Cloud software deployment and updates can be conducted remotely and typically very quickly, so employees can spend less time waiting and be more productive.
Telemedicine has experienced significant growth. The cloud provides a secure platform for video consultations, remote monitoring, and virtual visits, enhancing healthcare accessibility, especially in underserved or remote areas. This proved invaluable during the COVID-19 pandemic, as healthcare providers turned to telehealth to continue delivering care while minimizing physical contact.
Data analytics offers the computational power needed to process vast amounts of medical data quickly. This capability supports evidence-based decision-making, accelerates medical research, and aids in population health management.
Current market landscape:
The healthcare cloud computing market is growing rapidly. This growth is being driven by a number of factors, including increasing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and other healthcare IT systems; need to improve patient care coordination and collaboration; rising demand for mobile healthcare applications; growing need for data analytics and insights and increasing focus on patient privacy and security.
Key players in cloud healthcare are the same as the major cloud providers. AWS offers a range of cloud services to healthcare organizations such as providing secure and compliant infrastructure for hosting EHRs, data analytics, and telehealth applications. Microsoft has been working on projects like Microsoft Healthcare Bot and Azure Health Data Services to enhance healthcare data management and AI-driven healthcare solutions. Google Cloud is involved in genomics research and drug discovery, leveraging its cloud infrastructure for these endeavors.
Top healthcare companies are also integrating cloud into their offerings. Medical device manufacturer Becton Dickinson uses Microsoft Azure to support data storage, sharing, and analysis for connected devices, SAP for an on-premise cloud platform, and Thales for its Vormetric data security platform. Drug and diagnostics developer, Roche has developed its cloud platform products such as RocheDiabeties Care Platform.
Other players include Johnson & Johnson, Allianz, AmerisourceBergen, Appian, AXA, Humana, MetLife and Ping An Insurance.