The healthcare industry creates and manages vast amounts of sensitive data that’s vital to excellent patient care and good health outcomes. In an already complex and data-intensive environment, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new challenges for healthcare organizations as they need to rapidly ramp up to support more patients, adhere to new reporting and regulatory processes and enable more devices for an increasingly dispersed workforce.
In an effort to increase operational flexibility, enable the ability to pivot to keep pace with industry changes and scale to accommodate growth, doctors, clinics, hospitals, specialists and other providers are moving technology and data storage into the cloud.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will help to optimize diagnosis across the healthcare industry. Aggregated and anonymized patient data can be used for forecasting, disease modelling and optimizing treatment outcomes. Deep analytics could identify trends for further research, new drug development or alternative diagnostic methods.
How can healthcare organizations take advantage of cloud to accelerate innovation and maintain business continuity? With data fabric that leverages total data mobility – and access for any workload in any environment – and the benefits that come from:
Role-Based, Gated Availability of Sensitive Health Information
Cloud computing makes it easier to provide authorized access to privileged information. For example, specific parts of a patient’s financial data, like their billing history, may not be available to frontline care providers. Likewise, details of medical conditions and treatment can be blocked from back-office staff who don’t need those details to do their work.
Easier Collaboration and Handover Between Healthcare Teams and Providers
Medical error is still one of the biggest threats to good patient care. Data stored in the cloud updates in real time, meaning that physicians and others always have the latest information to understand and collaborate on treatment options. Likewise, if there’s a handover between healthcare teams during a shift change, or a patient is moved to a new provider, everyone has access to the most recent patient history for better continuity of care.
Continual Backup of Important Healthcare Information
Cloud services provide real–time backup of healthcare data. In the event of hardware failure, power loss or data breaches, healthcare providers can quickly and easily restore data for minimal disruption or interruption to patient care. There are many types of backup available, including snapshots of data, iterative backups or live backups for immediate failover.