Cloud Computing – Changing the Healthcare Scenario
While there are a number of security and regulatory concerns in the health care sector holding back universal adoption of cloud computing, growth in this sector is still robust. The healthcare market which was worth just $1.8 billion in 2011 is expected to touch $5.4 billion by 2017. This is a cumulative average growth rate of nearly 20.5% – exceptional by any standards. While the market is growing robustly, no cloud service provider presently has a market share greater than 5%. Therefore the next five years may see plenty of consolidation, mergers and acquisitions.
Typically, the healthcare industry can be broken into Clinical and Non-Clinical sectors. The clinical sector is where the sensitive work gets done, and is most heavily regulated. Applications in this domain consist of Electronic Health Records, physician instructions and orders, investigations and imaging, and radiographic software. The specific fields covered in the clinical domain are listed below –
- Electronic health records / medical records
- Image archiving, retrieval and communication systems
- Radiology Management Systems
- Physician order and instruction management
- Laboratory management
- Pharmacy management system
- Other specialty related systems
The non-clinical domain is essentially concerned with managing the business end, handling issues like patient billing, claims, revenue cycle and employee management. This is similar to most other businesses and represents the more easily implemented end of business. The specific modules in this domain are –
- Revenue management systems
- Patient billing systems
- Cost accounting and control systems
- Payroll and employee management systems
- Claims management systems
Cloud computing makes it easy to share patient Electronic Health Records between doctors. In case, for example, a person from New York were to face a medical emergency in Los Angeles, the doctor he or she consults should have the latest data about medications, allergies, blood group and medical history. In case the person is unconscious or otherwise unable to tell, much time could be saved if the physician had immediate access to this data. While technologically there are no difficulties in implementing this, there are many regulatory issues involved. These regulatory issues and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are presently delaying the roll out of this capability.
Imaging is another major area where cloud computing can help the healthcare industry. Medical science has evolved its imaging capabilities far beyond X-rays, and these images are now occupying thousands of gigabytes. They must therefore be stored because they provide an excellent record of the progress of a medical condition. Storage and retrieval of these images presents challenges that the cloud is uniquely poised to handle.
While security has often been cited as a concern, most cloud security issues have been resolved and large numbers of business enterprises have pinned their faith upon cloud security. In any case, it has been often said that the physical and logical security provided to cloud based services and applications is much more than that of in-house data services. Availability of services in the public cloud has also been shown to be much higher as compared to captive services.
In summary, the healthcare industry will face a round of disruptive innovation as the presence of cloud computing increases. The cloud, as discussed earlier, is the perfect medium for delivery of electronic health records. Once this takes off, patients will save on duplication of tests and time wasted in waiting rooms. Billing will also become more transparent. There is also a churn occurring in the industry with pure cloud computing companies offering low cost pay-as-you-go models. The new cloud-based health care services are also far easier to deploy and have a very gentle learning curve.
It is certain that in ten years time, cloud computing will change the way healthcare works in developed countries.
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About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
