Personal and behavioral data is at a premium in the healthcare industry. Healthcare possesses one of the largest and most critical datasets, accounting for billions of people globally. Yet it is one of the select few industries that continues to run largely on legacy systems and rely heavily on paperwork.
Think about it: the first thing you do after walking into a hospital is to fill out a form! The data is then later manually entered into systems which run on decades-old technology. Hope you see the point. All of this is utterly inefficient, insecure, and results in poor services.
As with other industries, migrating your healthcare business to the cloud can not only alleviate most of these problems but open entirely new frontiers of next-gen healthcare services that would be much more effective, robust, and resilient than the systems we have today. Here are just a few highlights:
Better Security
Healthcare has always been the soft target of hackers looking to mostly collect confidential information and continue to operate on legacy systems. According to Protenus, there were 503 security breaches in 2018 with around 15 million patient records compromised. This year, the number has risen to at least 25 million. Cloud services are known to offer the best security measures, and are thus way tougher to crack than the crumbling IT infrastructure of healthcare providers.
Connected Healthcare
Healthcare providers often refer patients to different hospitals for varying purposes. This not only creates high redundancy in collecting patient records but also highly inconveniences both patients and doctors, who have to start from scratch. Cloud migration can help create a connected healthcare system where patient records can be seamlessly stored and shared. Imagine having a medical emergency in Oklahoma while your medical records are stored in a Chicago hospital. Connected healthcare can significantly cut down the response time compared to what we have today.
Integration with 3rd Party Services
Healthcare now expands far beyond hospitals and clinics. Today, numerous startups offer wellness services that can be much more effective if properly integrated with hospital systems. For instance, fitness tracking apps can periodically submit data directly to patient records or a pharmacy app can automatically order requite medicine based on prescription. This would not only improve patient convenience, but also contribute to creating much more reliable patient records.
Better Analysis
Do you know AI is now better than doctors at detecting some kinds of cancers? The point is, if healthcare services migrate to the cloud, they can leverage these new cutting-edge technologies to offer more effective services. For instance, patient records can create automatic screenings for specific symptoms to point out diseases even before they visit a hospital.
Better Efficiency
All of these factors when combined can contribute to lower costs and higher efficiency, leading to customer satisfaction. Healthcare providers can drastically cut down certain bottlenecks by adopting even simpler solutions like CRM, mobility, telephony, and others. In fact, these smaller adoptions can act as stepping stones for a larger cloud migration strategy.
Closing Remarks
Healthcare is one of the world’s most critical services, one that is starting to crumble under its own outdated IT infrastructure. At a time when there are entire industries based in the cloud, healthcare lags behind the curve in terms of cloud adaptation.
That is starting to change. And while many healthcare businesses are starting to see the inherent value and inevitability of cloud migration, the key reason for their reluctance is a nervousness around the process of migration itself. What will happen to my existing data? Would there be downtimes? This is where solutions like UpCurve can help. Schedule a free consultation now and we can together work on building an optimum migration strategy.
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