Cloud computing is an online environment where companies can host their entire IT infrastructure, including hospitals and medical clinics. Data, information, and systems can migrate to the cloud, and access is now carried out over the internet — access a link through the browser.
This strategy shifts much of the infrastructure’s responsibility to the environment provider. Thus, companies can transform their physical data centers into virtual ones, saving space, reducing costs, and bringing several advantages that allow for optimizing medical-hospital operations.
We spoke with the radiologist, who presented some of the main benefits of using cloud computing resources in the healthcare market. Check out!
Cloud computing helps keep systems and information more accessible remotely — that is, it is a tool that optimizes service delivery. Doctors and nurses gain quick access to a plan that will always be online and, consequently, can offer better care to patients.
Instead of keeping IT professionals busy with managing the local IT infrastructure, they can be reassigned to functions more related to the core business (core activity), such as developing new applications that facilitate the work of physicians. This opens doors for innovation in hospitals and clinics.
Hospitals and medical clinics work with highly confidential information. Thus, their protection should be a priority to add privacy and ethics to the relationships between physicians and patients.
Cloud computing facilitates this strategy, as providers have the best security professionals on the market and always use the main technological tools and methodologies to offer high-level shielding to private environments.
In addition, they recommend the best form of access and the ideal type of cloud for the level of information that will be stored. In the cloud, everything is more customizable and modular; therefore, it is easier to increase the privacy of specific documents and data.
Hospitals and doctors’ offices work in a critical environment. The impacts are enormous if the local server goes down and is only two minutes down. The tolerance for errors is minimal, and the availability of data and systems is essential to prevent failures and stoppages in operations.
As much as a company invests in offline contingency plans, availability is vital and receives more investment. In this case, cloud computing is the most efficient and cheapest way to invest in availability, as it has a network of redundant servers and backups spread across auxiliary servers.
According to Thiago Júlio, laboratories and imaging clinics face problems with scalability. The image capture and storage system, such as tomography and resonance, need to be very robust, as the files are heavy — a single exam can reach 1GB.
Health companies must consider that physicians need to receive information quickly and accurately. Therefore, the investment must be high in infrastructure and flexible to expand storage capacity as demand increases.
Clinicians face a significant challenge when maintaining a data center on their own. If there is not enough investment in infrastructure and the business grows fast, the data center will not be able to meet the demand, requiring new investments in equipment changes and slowing down the company’s development.
If the investment is too high, on the other hand, the extensive infrastructure can become expensive, and the company pays more for idle IT capacity, in case it takes time to reach the growth objectives.
The only way out of this impasse is to adopt cloud computing, which allows you to correctly size the IT infrastructure and scale the business proportionately, paying only for the resources used. The company needs less money to operate with cloud computing and can grow faster.
Access to new technologies is a significant advantage to be highlighted regarding this tool. Cloud computing providers increasingly seek new services to add excellent value to the business.
Currently, the integration of multiple systems is a bottleneck since, in most cases, clinics and hospitals are made up of several different units, and these have other plans, making it challenging to integrate information.
Also Read: Comparing the Major Three Cloud Computing Service Providers