Healthcare in the cloud: Improve outcomes by breaking down boundaries

Health outcomes for an individual are influenced by several key factors — the person’s genetics and biology, the level of care received, their social and economic status, their behavior, and their social and physical environment¹. Addressing one area alone won’t deliver the desired results for the patients and the healthcare organizations involved in their care. For healthcare organizations, the current healthcare models also are not delivering satisfactory treatment within their cost constraints because people with chronic illnesses are living longer. 

To make a real difference, a high-level, integrated, digital transformation across the broader health, socio-economic network is needed. The cloud can help healthcare organizations address inefficiencies and service shortfalls, while also improving health outcomes by delivering a digital, 360-degree view of patient health and treatment history.

Life and health in the digital world

Outside of healthcare, consumers have grown accustomed to integrated, device-agnostic and highly available technology that makes life easier. Travel apps, for example, enable consumers to book an entire holiday in a single transaction. A travel app integrates various services and providers, seamlessly combining flight and hotel bookings, insurance purchases and rental car agreements.

But in healthcare, the experience is completely different. Patients are asked to provide the same information over and over again. They are often subjected to the same tests by different healthcare organizations. Patients have limited access to their own health data and often can’t access healthcare providers of outside standard office hours.

With few back-end systems integrated, patients’ care experience can feel poorly organized and out of date as they struggle to navigate a complex service network. The lack of integration affects not only the patients’ experiences but also their outcomes. Poor integration can lead to care delays, missed detection opportunities, overtreatment and/or undertreatment, and a number of other avoidable impacts.

Successful digital outcomes depend on some important considerations. The first consideration is that providers should determine the best applications to use. Healthcare must be ready and able to adapt to provider and patient preferences.

The second consideration is that new platforms are already disrupting value chains and creating new service models. An example of this is Inova Health hospital in Ashburn, Virginia. Inova Health offers instant doctor appointments conducted via Skype video chat. This service is being adopted by the “Fitbit” (or other activity/ health wearables) generation and is creating massive disruption in the marketplace.

Adapting to change is not optional

So, what should traditional healthcare organizations do? Their success depends on enhancing their innovation agility. To adopt change faster, they need to implement and adapt to the necessary infrastructure management changes. Organizations’ infrastructure approach must support easy aggregation of services, applications and data across traditional boundaries. The approach must ensure continuous availability of critical healthcare delivery data to those who need it. At the same time, health organizations must not compromise their approach to data protection.

Innovative, agile organizations are flexible enough to adopt new platforms and will therefore move ahead of their peers in the healthcare ecosystem. They will accelerate deployment of new clinical products and services. They will make better use of the clinical data they hold. And, they will directly counter or leverage the value proposition of digital health entrants, such as Google, Amazon and Apple.

This shift requires organizations to reconceptualize many current healthcare offerings into as-a-service or cloud solutions. Innovative service management techniques help to accelerate adoption of cloud-native technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT). New tools and faster processes enable healthcare organizations to innovate so they can keep up with patient expectations and enable better patient experiences and outcomes.

Digital healthcare transformation by cloud

Cloud capabilities unlock data access from any system or device, anytime, anywhere. Yet healthcare has been slow to follow the otherwise ubiquitous adoption of the cloud.

The cloud can even make tackling important security issues less complex. For instance, working with a HIPAA-compliant cybersecure cloud vendor enables a deployment that supports secure data exchange with 24×7 availability and without data loss. While this can also be achieved using traditional methods, the cloud simplifies it.

Cloud vendors provide a rich, software-defined hosting fabric that streamlines tasks. One example of streamlining is automating workload deployment, which is auditable even before it is executed. Deployments are consistent. Updates to address vulnerabilities become easier. Innovative solutions can be made available faster.

Capabilities such as automated and audited deployments have remained elusive in healthcare. Elasticity for infrastructure investment is difficult to achieve. Access to essential data — when patients and clinicians require it — can become blocked. Data access is constrained because it is locked into systems in different organizational silos. These systems have been built using traditional, on-premises, “hardwired” methods. Change management and integration are hard to achieve with a fragmented infrastructure and lack of governance.

Let us take prescription services as an example: A patient with diabetes may have forgotten to request an insulin prescription refill from the doctor. Now that patient needs urgent access to insulin, outside of normal doctors’ hours. With siloed systems, the patient’s only option may be to visit an emergency center.

That is an avoidable patient impact and cost to the healthcare system. A better alternative would be a system allowing patients to grant pharmacists one-time access to their medical records. Patients’ control over their own records enables them to receive an emergency prescription. A “just-in-time” consent model improves the patient experience and reduces the complexity of service delivery.

Cloud-enabled interoperability. This kind of innovative consent model requires interoperability between software and services from different providers. It’s easier to achieve that with a cloud-first technology strategy because the cloud’s foundational building blocks provide “connective tissue” that enable providers to rapidly cross-connect services without new networks and additional investment.

The network is already shared. The rules for access are managed within the software. More resources can be elastically added and paid for on a pure utility consumption model. The right integration plan can help healthcare organizations place more focus on service capabilities. Security can be continuously reviewed and managed within the right software. New, innovative ways of solving problems can be developed.

As healthcare technology progresses, cloud platforms make it easier to leverage innovative solutions such as machine learning (ML), AI and voice integration by lowering adoption thresholds, especially compared to on-premises asset acquisition and management and operational requirements.

Let’s consider traditional on-premises approaches. On-premises systems are protected by physical networks and air gaps. The complexity of firewall and network management can lead to many firewall rules being undocumented or poorly understood. They likely have been constructed from the layered requirements of many different solutions. Understanding the impact of change therefore takes longer than one would expect.