Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Cloud computing in health care industry is propelled by requirements to cut operational cost and improve the quality of care (Raza, 2017). From the business perspective, reduction in operational expense is hampered by the rising cost of administrative, infrastructure and pharmaceutical expenditures. On the other hand, patients and governments are pressing for improved quality of healthcare. In order to run the IT infrastructure internally using traditional measures, health care providers are required to acquire and maintain hardware, software and resources even when the utilization is low. Due to which health care providers are switching to cloud in the rapidly evolving and high demand environment where they are required to pay only for services they use in the form of applications, storage, infrastructure services etc. Cloud offers flexibility and scalability with the changing demands and at the same time reduce the deployment time of new services (2017).

There are some new challenges when businesses move from traditional IT infrastructure of data centers to cloud, the traffic which was previously flowing internally is now traversing internet thus face bandwidth, availability and security obstacles (Raza, 2017). Private cloud offers security but at higher cost than public cloud offerings. Often healthcare providers chose hybrid cloud by running a mix of internal private and public cloud services, which gives them flexibility to host sensitive data internally and rest on public cloud (2017).

Hospital and healthcare management (2018) cited an example of South Jersey Healthcare where cloud was chosen to boost availability, security, cost predictability and business continuity using Siemens cloud computing model hosted in Pennsylvania. Alharbi, Atkins, Stanier and Al-Buti (2016) presented the case study of a Saudi hospital adopting cloud computing for their IT requirements. Saudi hospital was facing issues with their traditional IT infrastructure which was based on outdated architecture, not helpful in managing IT resources and downtime associated with maintenance issues. The objective was to increase productivity, resource utilization, ease of information sharing, resource availability, customer satisfaction and cost benefits. Hospital chose private cloud using existing IT infrastructure but outsource the operations to third party vendors with cloud operational expertise. To measure the performance of cloud’s effectiveness, several metrics were measured such as customer satisfaction, number of visits to hospital site, number of self-service stations for patients, number of hospital mobile app downloads, decreased overall IT cost, virtualization of servers, head count reduction, improved innovation, external interfaces to other organizations, support of IT departments, maintenance time, response time, network availability and so on (2016). Nagarajan and Sukanesh (2012) presented the study to compare the performance of web service model versus cloud service model from the perspective of process time, resource utilization and memory utilization implemented at the hospital in southern India. Cloud model outperformed the web service model in all three test cases (2012).

References:

Nagarajan, K. & Sukanesh, R. (2012). Case study in software as a service (SaaS) based emergency healthcare in India. European Journal of Scientific Research, 69(3), 461-472

Alharbi, F., Atkins, A., Stanier, C. & Al-Buti, H. (2016). Strategic value of cloud computing in healthcare organizations using the balanced scorecard approach: a case study from a Saudi hospital. The 6th international conference on current and future trends of information and communication technologies in healthcare, 332-339

Raza, K. (2017). How the cloud is transforming healthcare. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/06/13/how-the-cloud-is-transforming-healthcare/#737394921fd7

Hospital and Healthcare Management (2018). Case Study – reaching for healthcare IT value in the cloud. Retrieved from https://www.hhmglobal.com/knowledge-bank/articles/case-study-reaching-for-healthcare-it-value-in-the-cloud