In addition to opening up a world of possibilities to drive efficiencies and improve patient care, cloud infrastructure meets several other challenges healthcare organizations routinely face as traditional IT systems fall short of delivering for a changing market and in light of an evolving technology landscape. The key areas where cloud delivers benefits include:
The Challenge The industry is grappling with how to protect the changing IT landscape along with patient and healthcare data from fast-evolving threats. In particular, there is a need for increased security to protect sensitive patient data without risk and to ensure compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other evolving regulations. According to Nutanix’s “Enterprise Cloud Index Report,” over 28% of the healthcare respondents named security and compliance as their No. 1 decision criterion in choosing where to run workloads.
Other cybersecurity-oriented challenges include data theft compromised through the rise of ransomware attacks, the security of IoT-connected medical devices, zero-trust perimeterless attacks that go beyond the firewall, and the need to protect data privacy according to personally-identifiable-information (PII) and HIPAA regulations.
Where Cloud Helps Many healthcare organizations are hesitant to move to the cloud, due to cybersecurity concerns. Yet in reality, the cloud offers higher levels of protection that are not contingent on staffing a workforce of specialized and expensive security talent. Cloud services can deliver access to extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities and security incident and event management (SIEM) to help track and mitigate cyberrisks.
“For hospital providers contemplating moving workloads to the cloud, cybersecurity comes first,” says John Teoh, client technical leader at Kyndryl. “Many clients say there is no way they’re going to put their electronic health record system or production system in the cloud, but in many ways, cloud security is even more secure than most hospital networks. Hospitals are dependent on how good their security folks are in protecting themselves, and that runs the gamut. Cloud brings a new level of protections … that addresses their security and network latency needs.”
The Challenge To deliver an optimal patient experience, healthcare providers need access to patient data, which may be in different systems and data repositories. One hospital might use one system to schedule appointments and present test results, but if a patient needs more specialized follow-up care, that person could be dealing with another healthcare entity that relies on completely different EHRs. That creates a management headache for the patient and the care team.
There are other scenarios that require data integration: Between EHR systems, between provider and payer systems, among different payers, as well between the patient and the EHR. Consolidation among healthcare providers is also driving a need for interoperability and integration. The goal is to make patient records from one unit easily available to physicians in another unit, for example. Shared systems and data must also be accessible so the combined entities can optimize resources and reduce costs.
The end-to-end data supply chain is another area where interoperability is crucial. “All of that supply chain data from the patient to the resources and back-end systems — that level of interoperability is becoming an even more pervasive requirement for any optimization in hospital systems,” notes Rishi.
Where Cloud Helps Cloud-based data integration services such as cloud API service for FHIR enables rapid exchange of data through Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards. This capability makes it easier for anyone working with health data to ingest, manage, and persist protected health information (PHI) in the cloud and to prepare for compliance with FHIR patient access rules. Cloud platforms also provide an avenue for healthcare providers and hospitals using different EHR systems and operating from different business models to create a shared repository that collects all this disparate data and opens up access to different parties, based on specific controls. “With digital transformation, it really highlights how important it is to interoperate between systems,” Teoh says.
The Opportunity AI and ML are at the center of new strategies as companies across the healthcare spectrum pivot to more predictive services and preventive care options. Data and AI can power up smart diagnosis and symptom trackers to more quickly and proactively identify conditions and prescribe treatment plans. AI-powered workflows can automate tasks for clinicians and practitioners in areas such as billing and scheduling as well as streamline onerous paperwork. On the payer front, AI and ML can underpin new systems that analyze patient data and trends to get more competitive with pricing, including the ability to offer microtargeted premiums and personalized coverage and plans.
Where Cloud Helps Cloud delivers the compute and storage capacity necessary to store and process large data stores necessary to train and refine AI models. Cloud addresses the scalability and flexibility issues associated with building these new complex workflows and systems, including the ability to handle and interpret critical unstructured data such as X-rays, images, lab tests, and conversation notes, which are central to diagnosis and interpreting data trends to formulate treatment plans.
“There is a ton of data out there that can be utilized to make all these sophisticated machine learning and deep learning models to predict an outcome,” Rishi explains. “That
outcome could be healthcare insurance premiums or the drug discovery distribution supply chain — there are endless use cases out there.”
The Challenge The frequency of hardware refreshes and upgrade cycles for critical systems such as EHR has escalated, from traditional five-to-six-year cycles to a need to upgrade systems every couple of years to stay competitive and remain in compliance. This creates a huge burden for healthcare IT organizations, which are already understaffed and don’t have the time or the bandwidth to deal with constant upgrades in addition to more pressing and high-value digital transformation needs.
Where Cloud Helps The ability and scalability of the cloud enable healthcare organizations to keep up with a changing regulatory climate along with a fast-paced upgrade cycle without requiring continuous and significant capital investments. “With the cloud, healthcare organizations can switch from a CapEx model to an OpEx model, which can be a huge savings,” notes Peter Tung, industry chief architect at Kyndryl. “They also don’t have to deal with employee retention issues when they switch to a cloud model.”
The Challenge With the increase in natural disasters and other unforeseen events, DR has become a big issue, and IT outages and failures can be catastrophic, especially in relation to patient safety and continuum of care. In addition, healthcare organizations struggle with planning IT capacity for EHR rollouts as well as automating and deploying key applications and systems.
Where Cloud Helps Cloud delivers the flexibility and scalability to accommodate the exploding demand for storage and compute capability based on need, without having to buy, secure, and maintain data center hardware. In addition, cloud-based backup makes it easier to recover from natural disasters, technical failures, or ransomware and other cyberattacks.