By Aredis S Oliveira and Biplav Srivastava
Healthcare is a major industry affecting the daily lives of citizens around the world, and information technology (IT) has played a major role in improving the quality of service for patients while keeping the costs manageable.
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Today, more and more healthcare vendors are moving their offerings to the cloud. However, some stakeholders remain skeptical whether this is the right direction for the industry. Here are five reasons why we think it is the right move, and why healthcare professionals (including doctors, nurses and others indirectly involved) should adopt cloud-based services.
1. The role of IT is increasing in healthcare. Recent advances include the use of systems like IBM Watson to help practitioners consolidate patient medical records, information from a broad array of clinical studies and online diagnostic tests to improve recommendations for patients and healthcare delivery in general.
2. Demand for healthcare services is increasing as population continues to grow. Simultaneously, the costs of staff and resources have increased. Healthcare providers are thus looking for IT solutions that are scalable and that help to reduce costs over time.
3. Apart from patient services, it is becoming important for healthcare administrators around the world to have IT solutions that can check and track credentials of health practitioners. The current paper-based tracking systems used in many countries is simply too slow, costly and prone to loss and fraud.
4. Recent IT challenges in the healthcare sector include data privacy, high data volume and technology complexity. Internet of Things (IoT) technology may help to improve patient care but will also necessitate even more IT than seen today, which the healthcare industry is already struggling to support.
5. In order to give the most benefit for patients, practitioners need IT that can harness advanced analytics on data collected from all sources. But healthcare providers are not IT experts; they are technology consumers. So cloud-based analytical services is the best way forward and can help providers make the most of all available resources to improve patient care.
IBM has supported the healthcare industry to enter in a new era of transformation by providing technologies, solutions and consulting that can enable organizations to take advantage of the most advanced industry resources. IBM Watson is an example of how advanced analytical services and humans can collaborate to arrive at healthcare diagnoses and treatment of patients. Without cloud, this capability would be too expensive to offer to patients.
We acknowledge that our view is based on a limited personal experience and data points. We would love to hear what you think and any more reasons to consider. Leave a comment below or contact us on Twitter @arliveira and @biplav_s.
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