Although the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted us far and wide, healthcare is one sector that has borne the brunt of this global crisis. However, this front-line sector has taken this challenge as an opportunity and evolved towards cloud powered telehealth.
The concept of telehealth is not entirely new, but it has assumed a completely different importance in the post pandemic world. Now, telehealth has been propelled into the mainstream, as it is a technology that is ensuring timely and safe delivery of healthcare.
Granted that there are compliance and regulatory bottlenecks to contend with, given the highly sensitive and regulated nature of this sector. Still, the manner in which the overall telehealth ecosystem has evolved over the past few months is phenomenal.
In the new cloud driven telehealth ecosystem, there will be zero to minimal physical interface between patients and healthcare providers. This will not only make the entire process a lot safer for both, but a lot quicker and easier as well.
This new ecosystem is being powered by virtual clinics, online patient message counters where they are informed about any critical event related to their health, and even real-time patient clinician interaction via remote channels.
However, there are some challenges that will need to be addressed to genuinely take telehealth into the mainstream. The first and foremost challenge is to enhance both the capacity and security of endpoint devices being used by healthcare providers.
Then, the other key building block of this ecosystem is the robustness of the healthcare provider’s own network. This is where Public Cloud Providers (CSP) like dinCloud also have a lead role to play, as they can easily plug this infrastructure gap.
By leveraging the readily available and instantly scalable cloud infrastructure of CSPs like dinCloud, healthcare providers can resurrect fully functional and operational telehealth platforms in a matter of weeks or months at the most.
Last but not the least will be the ever present challenge of keeping telehealth channels secure from internal vulnerabilities and external threats. This is yet another area where each participant will have to play their respective role to achieve the desired results.
One thing is for sure though, we are steadily and surely moving towards a healthcare ecosystem that, for the most part, is driven by telehealth.
