Key Benefits of the Cloud in Healthcare
April 27, 2017
Speaking of advantages, there are a number of key benefits offered by the implementation of cloud in healthcare. These benefits are not just helping healthcare service providers operate better, but benefiting patients as well. Here are the key benefits of the cloud in healthcare.
Faster and More Accurate Treatments
Doctors, physicians, and nurses – healthcare providers in general – rely on information to provide patients with accurate and effective treatments. The information they needed was stored in the form of printed documents and offline digital archives. Before doctors could gain access to a patient’s complete medical records, they needed to jump through hoops to get them.
Today, however, cloud computing is changing the way medical institutions store information. Cloud storage offers affordable and efficient ways to store information. It also offers universal access and better security compared to similar solutions from five years ago. This changes the healthcare landscape completely.
Instead of relying on nurses and helpers to go through files, doctors can instantly log into the cloud platform from their medical tablets. At the same time, patients can approve access to their complete medical records. As a result, the entire healthcare industry can deliver better care, faster.
Comprehensive Collaborations
There is another interesting development enabled by the use of cloud, and that is immense collaboration. Doctors and medical experts from all around the world can come together in the cloud and work on a case in real-time. A doctor who is having trouble diagnosing a patient in Malaysia can now consult fellow doctors in the US. At the same time, the US doctors can review complete medical data directly on the collaborative platform.
Comprehensive collaborations are bringing the entire medical industry two steps forward. This type of collaboration is also happening among researchers, allowing research and medical product development projects from companies such as DeviceLab to tap into more expertise and experience. The cloud enables faster advances in medical research and allows experts to work collectively in making the world healthier.
Long-Term Security
We’ve talked previously about how the cloud is perfect for storing information. Another way the healthcare industry is taking advantage of the affordable, secure storage solution is by adding multiple redundancies to the mix. The costs of maintaining rooms full of medical records can now be used to maintain clusters of servers for long-term storage. No need to worry about losing patients’ records since they are now stored in multiple locations.
Security also comes from the advanced measures put in place. HIPAA laid a good foundation for healthcare information management. Cloud service providers are taking security even more seriously through the use of encryption and multiple measures.
The impact of the cloud in healthcare is too big to list in a single article. Based on these key benefits, however, it is easy to see how cloud computing is changing our healthcare industry for the better.