Merging Cloud and Healthcare: Still a Long Way to Go
Digital transformation has changed the world of IT and business, thereby helping enterprises assume a state of computational and storage excellence across great work domains. Cloud, which lies at the very center of this digital disruption, has come across as an essential motivator for enterprises to offer required services via a simple holistic work model.
The Medical Cloud
The impact of IT on the healthcare sector has been a point of considerable debate around the world. One big reason behind this open-ended debate is the lack of stringent data compliance and security standards in work setup.
Cloud computation has changed the healthcare service facilitation largely, allowing healthcare experts to manage, assist, and treat their patients with higher proficiency and lower abeyance. Operational costs have significantly decreased, and better service catering has been made widely accessible, even for underprivileged patients across remote locations.
Not just service catering, cloud advancement has dramatically transformed the medical research and knowledge-sharing domain as well. With continued research and development, the future of advanced healthcare cloud seems attainable where real-time diagnosis and efficient healthcare can be provided on demand. Cloud, in its true entirety, packs immense potential for the healthcare landscape, especially in areas like efficiency expansion, service personalization, and cost-cutting. With precise planning, cloud technology can enable innovative transformations, and real-time insight generation across the healthcare sector with significant thought put into the domain of data security and compliance.
How soon will Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) turn mainstream?
The concept of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) has been around for quite a while now. However, to adopt the idea of EHR in technological giants, healthcare providers need to be on the same page to create, maintain, and validate updated digital records of patients’ health.
EHRs can help healthcare experts to easily access and review the patient’s past and current health status at any point of time and initiate better medical trails in emergencies.
However, presently implemented cloud environment fails to serve the necessary requisites for EHR deployment. Cloud service providers need to bring in better technology stack to improve the privacy and security protocols so that critical health data remains inaccessible from wrongful intents.
Challenges
One of the biggest challenges to widespread cloud adoption is the risk of data misuse. Current cloud security measures do not have provisions for the desired level of data security for critical health data. Today, when data hacking and security breaches have become quite common around daily news portals, cloud providers need to address the security issue in their infrastructure to ensure the risk-free realization of cloud tech.
HIPAA compliance is also one of the major roadblocks in EHR implementation. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has made it mandatory for healthcare providers to adhere to security protocols to maintain and safeguard patient privacy. Both cloud providers and healthcare experts need to team up to devise a comprehensive strategy for implementation of HIPPA compliant secure standards in patient’s medical records. Moreover, cloud implementation at such a large scale can put a substantial operational and financial strain upon healthcare institutions, leading to considerable loss of efficiency and downtime.
That being said, the application areas of cloud in the health care sector are continually advancing. However, security and various other healthcare related challenges cannot be overlooked while looking at the brighter side. Pratham is the leading software development company in India with numerous successful project lineup to its name. The cloud development team at Pratham software has deployed various domain-specific projects which have set efficiency benchmarks across multiple platforms. Visit us to experience technical skills like no other.