In response to the myriad COVID-19 disruptions, organizations across the spectrum have accelerated the shift to digital healthcare delivery enabled by cloud, with rates of adoption in a single year equivalent to what was expected to be transformed over a five-to-10-year period. The numbers confirm the steady swell of cloud deployment. The global healthcare cloud computing market, which was valued at $32.4 billion in 2020, is projected to soar to $128.2 billion by 2028, growing at a CAGR of 18.74% from 2021 to 2028, according to Vantage Market Research. Cloud deployment in the sector is fueled by increasing adoption of big data analytics, wearable devices, and the internet of things (IoT), the report found. Moreover, the proliferation of new payment models, the dynamic nature of new health benefit plan designs, and cost-efficiency advantages have also contributed to the surge in cloud adoption, Vantage Market Research found. Hybrid cloud, which combines private and public cloud services, is the healthcare sector’s model of choice. In its ranking by industry, the “Enterprise Cloud Index Report” from Nutanix put the healthcare sector third in the number of hybrid cloud deployments currently running. Over the next two years, healthcare providers’ hybrid cloud deployment will jump from 19% penetration to 37%, the report determined. Healthcare organizations favor the hybrid cloud model because it enables them to maintain sensitive workloads that involve protected health information in a private environment while enabling other workloads to tap public cloud’s reliability, reduced up-front costs, increased flexibility, ease of services consumption, breadth of available applications, and elasticity.
Specifically, the ability of cloud compute and storage technologies to scale with surging data requirements and workloads makes cloud a natural platform to accommodate the needs of research and clinical trials being conducted in the life sciences space. Cloud platforms are also well suited to run AI and ML applications now so prevalent in healthcare, given their near-infinite capacity for scalability, storage, and flexibility. And cloud’s ability to deliver anywhere, anytime access to services has been essential for providing virtual care to patients as well as enabling remote operations during a period when much of the world is shutting down for protracted periods. The pandemic experience has highlighted the disconnect between those organizations in the sector making the leap to cloud and those that haven’t. A JAMA study found that 20% to 25% of U.S. healthcare spending is wasteful. The largest contributor to that number is administrative costs, accounting for $266 billion annually. Although the multifaceted problem calls for a multidisciplinary approach, research data indicates that healthcare organizations that committed to a cloud pathway and enlisted the help of solution provider partners have addressed some of the more egregious problem areas and have fared far better than those that haven’t migrated. “Post-COVID, the impact of technology has dramatically changed,” says Sheetal Rishi, cloud engineering and competency leader at Kyndryl. “Cloud technology can enhance the patient experience, provide more value-based healthcare, and optimize the time of physicians and nursing staff — during a period when they are all stretched. Cloud technology in healthcare is contributing extensively toward making digital medical records accessible globally, enabling collaboration to drive an exponential impact on patient care.”