The healthcare industry is starting to move from products and services to solutions. Digital platforms, big data analytics, and other competitive IT solutions for the healthcare industry are now becoming popular, which is a dramatic change considering that the industry used to be dependent on manual labor, equipment, and hardware. As the focus of healthcare continues to shift from treatment to prevention, expect technological trends to come into play – starting with cloud computing.
Cloud computing is the practice of leveraging a network of remotely accessible servers to store, manage, and process data. The cloud is online storage, which means you have almost unlimited capacity, compared to your local server or computer.
Healthcare and medical facilities can enjoy these three advantages through cloud computing.
Efficient and Collaborative Patient Care
Hospitals and doctors’ offices have relied on physical files, charts, and handwritten notes for decades to manage patient information. As you can expect, this method tends to be slow since they have to dig through folders and folders of documents before finding what they need. And in life-or-death situations, where every second counts, this inefficiency can be a problem.
Cloud computing offers better health information management. Doctors can access a patient’s medical records in just a few clicks. On top of that, the cloud serves as a single access point for patient information, which allows multiple doctors and nurses to view the documents at the same time. This means medical professionals can consult and collaborate with each other regarding a patient’s status in real-time.
Also, cloud technology allows more effective collaboration between hospitals. It’s easier to transfer a patient to another healthcare facility, along with his or her medical records, if the current one lacks certain equipment. The new hospital can download the files and review them at the touch of a finger.
Better Data Management and Analysis
The volume of information you upload in the cloud can get overwhelming as it grows. But you can equip this technology with accounting and analytics tools to make the data manageable.
Apart from a clearer understanding of an individual’s medical history, cloud computing also gives medical professionals and researchers the ability to study the health of the general public. As you collect more data, you have more information and perspective to spot trends in diseases in a certain area, which can help that location avoid public health crises. This method of mining data will provide vital insight that can catapult the industry’s goal of shifting the priority from treatment to prevention.
Enhanced Data Security
Some healthcare institutions may be reluctant to migrate their data into cloud infrastructures because of the threat of cybersecurity breaches. But cloud computing can provide tighter security for your data if done right.
The most basic step in data security is to encrypt it end to end. Encryption doesn’t stop once you’ve uploaded all of your files; you also have to encrypt your data while it’s passively stored. This makes the data will useless for hackers even if they manage to break into the cloud infrastructure.
Also, healthcare cloud computing platforms must adhere to the compliance requirements of HIPAA or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. HIPAA is a federal legislation that aims to ensure data privacy and secure medical information.
These are only three of the benefits healthcare facilities can get from cloud computing platforms. But with the right service provider, you can maximize this technology and give your facility greater capabilities.
You can count on CMIT Solutions for high-performing and well-managed cloud and other IT solutions. We’ll take care of the details while you take care of patients.
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