It has become a necessity for healthcare industry to adopt Health Care Cloud Options to provide matchless patient care services. Health industry has seen a rapid growth of migration to cloud computing solutions in the past decade. According to Global Market Insights Inc “Healthcare Cloud Computing Market will Hit $55 Billion by 2025” which means that this industry is expected to become a multi-billion dollar profitable business.
Cloud Computing in Medical Practice
Health industry is highly competitive and every business wants to be a step ahead of its competitors. This never ending race encouraged IT industry to come up with smart solutions and advancements to help healthcare industry grow further. Cloud Computing In Medical Practice is one example of this. Many healthcare organizations have already migrated to the Cloud Infrastructure in Health Care Sector from on prem legacy systems.
Such Digital Transformation In Healthcare has provided many advantages and some disadvantages mentioned below:
Advantages of Cloud Computing In Healthcare Sector
Below are some advantages of Cloud Computing in Healthcare Industry:
Cost Savings
Success of any business is determined by ROI (Return on Investment) and everyone out there is continuously looking for solutions that can reduce cost and increase profit without compromising on the quality of services. In healthcare industry Hosted Virtual Desktop Applications provide answers to all cost saving questions while keeping security and quality intact. Cloud computing solutions exponentially reduces the cost of IT infrastructure where Healthcare practices can get rid of in-house server, storage and other additional costs like administration, air conditioning and much more.
Easy Access to Data
Healthcare business needs easy and quick access to data related to patients which is critical at times. It was always a difficult task to fetch test reports and healthcare records when the internal system aren’t working and data can’t be accessed remotely but cloud computing provided solutions to this problem. Cloud for Healthcare Industry provides easy access to all industry related data whether it is any test result or any record or any other mission critical file.
Continuous Care
Best thing about cloud is it makes sure a nonstop and continuous care with easy access to the systems outside office to all physicians, staff, patients and administrators. With this people including but not limited to patients and doctors can collaborate more effectively in a secure and easy to use environment to provide and get continuous care whether they are in office, at home or on the go
Dependable and Consistent
In a critical and ever so important industry like healthcare, it is very important to make sure that all the resources and infrastructure is dependable and consistent. Cloud computing is the perfect solution to this problem as it is dependable and consistent at the same time. Most of the cloud services providers these days provide service level agreements (SLA) which guarantee continuous access and almost zero downtime.
Features On-Demand
There is a long list of features offered by different cloud computing service providers for all industry related needs and requirements. But a single business may or may not need some features and at a certain period in time some features may be completely useless for them and they may require them at times. So to avoid extra added cost, healthcare practices easily disable or activate new features, expand or contract by simply sending an email or on a single call. This makes it easy for business owners to make it more effective by selecting only the feature which they need and require and can spin up and down on the fly.
24×7 Security and Compliance
Cloud computing providers offer 24×7/365 IT security and compliance services for which they hire dedicated and certified staff to make sure their clients get best security of data and all compliance mandates are up to date. This feature actually reduces cost of healthcare practices and they don’t have to worry about the security of data at all.
Offload Data Collection
As this industry is growing rapidly, competition within the industry is also growing with the same pace which urges the healthcare organizations to collect more and more data. These organizations keep collecting records and data and store previous data as well which actually makes it difficult for them to manage. This is where cloud solutions jump in and provide an easy solution of offloading some of the data, makes it accessible remotely and at the same time make sure it is secure.
Better Security
As healthcare practices collect and keep large amount of data it was always difficult for them to secure this data. With old infrastructure it requires a lot of extra added cost just to maintain good security of the data. Cloud offers better security as there are less chances of data being stolen and offsite storage can also reduce security cost as well.
Adding Value to Business
Cloud adds value to the business though many ways like saving cost, easy access of data, more security and increased productivity. The gains in efficiency and productivity is often proved much more than paying for cloud and security. Healthcare organizations can improve productivity and provide better services to their customers which matters a lot because if their customers are happy with them they can consider their business is successful as customer experiences translates into customer loyalty and customer loyalty translates into increased ROI.
Disadvantages of Cloud Computing In Medical Industry
Below are some disadvantages of Cloud Computing in Medical Industry and these are as follows:
Limited Control
One disadvantage of cloud is that it is completely managed and monitored by the service provider and the organization may have less control over their infrastructure. This is one serious concern for organizations but service providers take care of this by giving guarantees and signing multiple contracts in this regard.
Outages
As cloud service provider companies manage multiple clients at the same time which can at times cause trouble and support challenges. There are also chances that services providers may face some outage issues which will ultimately effect healthcare organizations performance and business.
Data Security
Although cloud services providers are asked to complete industry certifications and implement best security standards but still storing data on a third party or external server triggers risks. Hackers will always look for loopholes within a system and exploit data. However if a service provider is using a good security program and have an experienced team it can easily mitigate these challenges.
