Delivering Great Care and Support
Cloud computing is relatively recent in healthcare, being largely used in the industry just since 2016. The first improvements it brought were centralized electronic health records (EHR), remote care, delivering medical services to rural areas and low-income patients.
After the COVID-19 pandemic began, companies who had been hesitant to adopt it before changed their views and welcomed the cloud. The trend will only increase as recent research shows that the healthcare industry’s global market for cloud technologies is expected to grow by $25.54 billion during the 2020–2024 period.
What factors drive healthcare to adopt the cloud?
Changes mean opportunities, and after one of the biggest changes in the XXI century, the COVID-19 pandemic, many industries found themselves needing to reshape, and healthcare is no exception. Innovative cloud technologies help the changes to be made easier and faster. Thanks to cloud computing, ensuring a patient-centric approach, monitoring patient data remotely, focusing on prevention instead of treatment, and delivering healthcare in rural areas became possible.
Healthcare is a strictly regulated industry that deals with extremely sensitive data. There is no surprise that the choice is often made in favor of private clouds. They are ideal solutions if you have mission-critical workloads, requirements towards high security, data sovereignty or tailored management. Private cloud is the number one choice for regulated business industries, such as medical care, health insurance and medical research, that require a cloud environment separated and defended from a global computer network.
Personal data to stay private
Healthcare organizations need to comply with many regulatory requirements like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for personal data protection, the USA’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for secure data portability, or the HITRUST Alliance’s CSF. The industry-mediated certifiable standard for safeguarding sensitive information security becomes the top priority.
With a significant number of data breaches cases constantly reported in recent years, there is an increasing concern among patients and their relatives. They know healthcare organizations that use public cloud services could be compromised, and the privacy of sensitive personal data could be lost. Additionally, data leaks cost hospitals and other healthcare organizations millions of dollars every year. Cost of a Data Breach Studies made by the Ponemon Institute reveals that stolen healthcare records cost twice the global average.
Fortunately, high security is a hallmark for private clouds. A secure private environment, managed internally in the corporate data center or hosted by a reliable partner, provides enhanced privacy and security compared to a public cloud service, and eliminates the vulnerability of systems with sensitive healthcare data.
Not only healthcare organizations but also medical research institutions require the highest level of data protection. New drug formulas, experiment results, research discoveries — all sensitive data that ended up in the wrong hands could be dangerous. To protect highly sensitive data not only on a state level, our customer, German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure, chose cloud infrastructure managed by FishOS for its significant national de.NBI project. Sardina’s FishOS, an efficient private cloud management platform for enterprises, forms the backbone of de.NBI cloud environment to facilitate advanced European scientific discoveries in the field of innovative bioinformatics research. The highly reliable cloud platform based on OpenStack and Ceph storage capabilities enables integrative analyses and efficient use of data towards scientific breakthroughs.
Distance doesn’t matter
Every day the Healthcare industry generates large amounts of data. The ability to access the data remotely means breaking down geographical access restrictions to healthcare. As this study shows, private clouds can help make data available at all healthcare system levels thanks to standardized approaches. The private cloud makes it fast and secure for doctors and other medical staff to access patients’ data like clinical, non-clinical, healthcare management records, billing and claims.
Think of a country as vast as Australia, where considerable distances can be a significant obstacle when it comes to healthcare. Incarta is a Melbourne based provider of IT services tailored for the Australian Health sector needs. Incarta integrates the FishOS platform to manage private cloud environments for hospitals, healthcare centers, clinical research and medical insurance companies. FishOS makes it possible to accelerate, automate and modernize the cloud and create a secure and flexible environment for Altegix, customized predictive analytics for acute care. It measures a selection of clinical parameters, analyses them critically, then determines the likelihood that the patient’s health will deteriorate to a critical level. The Altegix results demonstrated a significant increase in MET-assisted calls and a reduction in mortality of hospitalized patients. It improves the standard of patient care through early detection and intervention of potentially life-threatening events.
With the coronavirus outbreak, many companies faced functional problems, but those who opted for a cloud infrastructure continued their smooth growth, especially in the healthcare industry. Cloud infrastructure allows many healthcare professionals to work remotely and give non-emergency consultations through video or phone calls.
Flexible reality
Collaboration between doctors, departments and institutions is essential. Thanks to private cloud computing, sharing facilitates collaboration while keeping it always secure. The data can be easily shared in real-time among healthcare providers: doctors, nurses, administrators and managers. Moreover, they can remotely access and consult medical reports keeping track of patients’ health. Besides making sharing easy and secure, the private cloud makes it fast. It grants you full access and control over the data, eliminating many access issues that may occur with shared cloud technology.
Private cloud platforms are perfect for businesses with constantly changing environments or hardly predictable future needs. It gives healthcare IT professionals the possibility to increase or decrease workload volume, adapting it to the patients’ flow. For example, during the high flu season or intense COVID-19 spread periods when the number of patients increases, healthcare organizations can adapt their cloud systems without purchasing additional hardware.
Private cloud scalability and flexibility is augmented with multi-tenancy and the ability to provision machines, alter computing resources on-demand, and create complex machines for giant computing jobs, like big data.
From FishOS with care
Specializing in OpenStack cloud solutions, Sardina Systems developed the cloud platform to provide a secure, highly scalable private cloud environment tailored to our customers’ industry-specific requirements. The FishOS solution accelerates and automates the infrastructure management of OpenStack and Kubernetes private cloud systems. Today, we are happy that our brainchild FishOS runs cloud infrastructures to research massive data, make scientific discoveries, and helps to deliver high-level medical services to people in different countries. We are proud to realize that IT technologies, like FishOS, help save human lives.
