How Cloud Is Playing An Important Role In Medicine

Today, there are more than 7 billion people on Earth. A few decades ago, no one could have thought of how much we have evolved and how much technology has developed. Years from now, there will be a lot more tech advancements in human life. Imagine a future, where a medical device simply samples your vitals and upload your health information, doctor analyzes the same basis your health records, you download a prescription of precision medicine from the doctor, order your medicine online, and get the delivery at home. This future of healthcare is here, where we are entering the digital age with remarkable potential for precision medicine to save and improve lives. The key driver of all these futuristic advancements is – CLOUD.

Cloud Medicine: The True Future of Healthcare

IT advancements in the healthcare industry have expanded extensively covering almost every segment of the industry. In the modern healthcare sector, hospitals and patients both demand a cost-effective system, easily accessible and secure infrastructure with disaster recovery. Cloud is the most viable technology and the biggest contributor in the healthcare sector. Cloud is helping hospitals and healthcare professionals to expand their footprints across all regions, including rural and urban geographies.

Cloud Medicine took a giant leap with the ‘Healthcare of Tomorrow Conference’ in Washington in 2016, where the cloud was projected as the trending tech for collecting and best managing data in the health care industry by Microsoft’s health and life science division. Global adoption for cloud services in healthcare is estimated to grow from US$3.73 billion in 2015 to over US$9.5 billion by 2020, as per the research firm MarketsandMarkets.

Furthermore, a survey from Level 3 and HIMMS Analytics found increasing adoption of cloud in the healthcare sector, specifically in the last 2 years. In the survey including healthcare providers and hospitals, 41% of respondents agreed using cloud services in health information exchange and 47% planned to use the cloud for disaster recovery and business continuity. These figures were 20% and 31% respectively 2 years ago in 2014.  Such statistics clearly define cloud as a tech poised to play an integral part in the future of healthcare.

Why Cloud Medicine? How it is changing Healthcare?

Cloud is playing a prominent role, helping healthcare organizations in deploying telemedicine, mobile health applications, remote monitoring tools, and other advanced healthcare facilities. Research by Gartner has also found out that cloud adoption is helping healthcare organizations to address and security and compliance concern to a great extent.

In today’s era of technological evolutions, the cloud has created a network for all disrupting techs like Artificial Intelligence, Programming Learning, Big Data Science across all verticals. In fact, a deep insight into healthcare evolution can show that from telemedicine to mHealth, precision medicine to e-clinics, and EHRs to AI-based robotics surgery, all healthcare technologies work under the purview of ‘Cloud Medicine’.

Consider a case showcased by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a research organization which uses genetic analysis to diagnose and develop treatments for diseases including cancer, neurological disorders, and diabetes and other medical conditions. The human genome, generally having more than 3 billion base pairs, creates a human blueprint that holds all information for creating and maintaining the body. Today, individual genome mapping has become possible with the help of cloud and over 30TB of genetic data can be processed to derive precision medicine for personalized treatment within hours. TGen genetic screening using cloud has guided doctors to different treatment for a child’s tumor, which wasn’t responding to chemotherapy. But with the help of Cloud Medicine, doctors figured a personalized treatment and the tumor shrunk over 80% resulting in the healthy recovery of the child. It can clearly be stated that the scalability of cloud architecture can enable healthcare service provides to serve every patient with personalized treatment.

The Cloud Intervention in Healthcare

Cloud has become a catalyst for innovation in the healthcare sector to improve medical and clinical research efforts. It is providing greater collaboration and access to patient data, supporting digital healthcare services and various solutions like mHealth, telehealth, e-clinics, telemedicine, EHRs (Electronic Health Records) & smart connected health devices. The exponentially growing cloud medicine is also finding utilization is different verticals of the healthcare sector.

The world is entering a ‘Post-EHR’ era as most countries are readily adopting the EHR system for their healthcare programs. Now the focus is on moving to find personalized treatment for patients across geographies and managing cloud center for the redeployment of resources earlier devoted to administration and support.

With big data analytics entering healthcare, the demand for healthcare data storage and archival requirements have also rocketed. The best plausible solution is this case also comes from the folds of the cloud. From EHRs to research, cloud medicine proposes a safe, secure, and easy access solution to both patients and healthcare service providers.

Speed and agility have become the new essentials of modern healthcare. The IT requirements of this modern digital era of healthcare can be realized with the cloud as the foundation. Cloud is helping in the evolution of healthcare data infrastructure at low cost and high speed. Cloud medicine is also enabling quick adoption of new technologies and delivery of better patient care. Cloud is growing even bigger taking the forefront of the healthcare services even in rare and critical situations of catastrophic events. The disaster recovery systems facilitated by cloud not only secure the medical data but also ensures adept healthcare aid post such situations.

VBRI has introduced cloud-based healthcare technology segments to give a non-invasive platform to millions of patients where they can get online or accurate real time measurements. This virtual healthcare integrated system is now in the third stage of field trial. Our door-step medical technology will create zero distance between health infrastructure and patients. The motif is to provide healthcare in general to everyone where the financial issues, distance issues, issues of education or language barriers will no longer be a matter to create boundaries. Mostly, four technologies are being integrated through devices or applications-IoT (Internet of things), machine learning, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology that could result into the virtual medicine at home.

Adoption of the cloud is going to increase in the future, owing to the rising needs of the healthcare sector to curtail costs and improve quality of care with better healthcare IT in a cost-effective manner. Telehealth, Telemedicine, mHealth, EHRs, and the formation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are creating greater growth opportunities for cloud in the healthcare sector. A survey by SADA systems also established that 89% of healthcare IT professionals give credit for happier patients, better treatment and more efficient hospital administration to cloud medicine network.

The modern-day healthcare service providers are leveraging cloud and implementing the concept of ‘Cloud Medicine’ on SaaS-based models to provide quality healthcare to everyone, anywhere, anytime. This is justifiable to say that the cloud has become the new foundation of health care and medical aid. In true sense, Cloud Medicine is the ‘healthcare of tomorrow’. – Business World

Dr. Ashutosh Tiwari is the Chairman and Managing Director of VBRI innovation and technology group headquartered in Sweden.