Healthcare Cloud Solutions Can Directly Help Improve Clinical Outcomes
As the name suggests, cloud computing in healthcare is the use of remote servers via the internet for storing, accessing, and managing medical information. This information includes lab tests, scans, electronic medical records, insurance claims, and so forth. Healthcare cloud solutions can, among other things, help manage this data better and even enable clinicians as well as payers to derive useful insights from them.
With the advent of mobile applications for healthcare, nutrition, and exercise, coupled with IoT-powered smart wearables, there has been an explosion of healthcare data. Mobile applications and wearables help users record health information like heart rate, electrocardiograms, temperature, and so on. Additionally, fitness enthusiasts routinely record their diets, calorie intake, distance walked, exercise regimen, and other lifestyle information. All of this is precious data when it comes to using a cloud solution for healthcare.
Data analytics has grown to become one of the most sought-after skills in just about every industry. Every company generates data about its operations, workflows, customers, and the market. Analyzing this information gives a comprehensive viewpoint for the management and enables them to make informed decisions.
Patients’ medical data holds extremely useful insights that can help doctors detect early signs of disease long before full-blown symptoms result in hospitalization. The more the data, the greater the accuracy of the insights gleaned. As more people use smartphone applications and smart wearables, the amount of data has grown by many orders of magnitude. Innovations in cloud computing in healthcare help manage this growing mound of data. Moreover, increasing investment in healthcare cloud services and policy research on advancing cloud computing in medicine have ushered in a new era of healthcare data management.
One of the biggest touted benefits of healthcare cloud solutions is in the treatment of chronic conditions. Research and surveys have discovered that approximately 40% of Americans suffer from at least one chronic disease. Healthcare experts have continually appealed to policymakers to declare this as a national medical emergency. By their very nature, chronic conditions (diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, etc) can’t be cured with a course of medication. They can only be managed. But factors like patients’ genetic predisposition, ethnicity, lifestyle, mental health have a direct impact on the management of chronic conditions.
Medical data analytics used alongside the cloud for healthcare helps providers assess large volumes of patient information. This analysis helps doctors to know which patients would contract chronic illnesses and to what degree. Moreover, healthcare cloud solutions for informatics also reveal the degree of success of treatments for each patient depending on his or her lifestyle, diet, and so forth. In other words, they help doctors know the outcomes for patients with chronic disease, thereby helping them adjust their approach for better results.
Leveraging historic and current medical data to predict future clinical outcomes empowers both doctors and patients to take a proactive approach to care, rather than a reactive one. This is one of the fundamental transformations that healthcare cloud solutions can help usher. It all begins with the storage of healthcare data. The cloud is naturally the best place to do so as it requires little investment in terms of IT infrastructure and support staff for providers. From then on, healthcare cloud solutions for analysis can work their magic and reveal insights to doctors who can make informed decisions regarding treatment.
