The healthcare industry is one of the most advanced technology users - within their domains. Anecdotal evidence has revealed that there is a wide range of capacity and capabilities in the healthcare industry with respect to patient management, especially when it comes to administrating large amounts of patient records and information. How has the healthcare industry pivoted towards using cloud technology to improve patient outcomes? This study documents a number of key case studies within Asia Pacific.
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2017 Towards Better Patient Outcomes and Staying Well: The Promise of Cloud Computing for the Healthcare Industry
1. CLOUD & HEALTHCARE
Twitter: @accacloud
Website: http://www.AsiaCloudComputing.org
Towards Better Patient Outcomes and StayingWell:The Promise of Cloud Computing for the Healthcare Industry
3. CLOUD & HEALTHCARE MARKET
What is driving the growth of cloud adoption in the healthcare industry?
Physical storage Digital storage
4. DRIVERSTHAT MOTIVATETHE CHANGE
TECHNOLOGY
Cost of cloud computing
Scalability & Elasticity
On-demand usage
Efficiency
Outsourcing
HEALTHCARE
Mindset change:
Curative to preventive care
Data sharing across healthcare
staff
5. HEALTHCARE &TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES
LOCATION
Bounded by locality
Unequal access to quantity and
quality of healthcare
COMMUNICATION
Connecting physician and patient
beyond locality
Case studies:
Medifi, Philippines
ReadyCare, Australia
6. BARRIERSTO ADOPTION
Cost vs security
How much can healthcare facilities
spend on data storage?
How secure is the data stored offsite?
What kind of regulatory compliance
is required?
What “cross-border” data exchanges
should/must be enabled for better
patient care?
7. SUMMARY OF REPORT
Variation in :
cloud adoption in sub-verticals
Data storage vs self-monitoring devices
Cloud adoption in different countries
Singapore
Australia
India
Vietnam
Malaysia
Brunei
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9. (A)TRANSFORMING HEALTHCAREWITH ELECTRONIC
RECORDS
Electronic health records offer many benefits, such as providing
real-time information to clinicians, which in turn, empowers
doctors to offer evidence-based treatment that ultimately
raises the quality of patient care. Allaying privacy concerns,
these records can be safeguarded electronically through a
secure, compliant cloud system. Doctors may be given
temporary access, and only when treating of a patient.
(B) ENABLING BETTER HEALTHCARE FOR REMOTE
COMMUNITIES
The reach and scalability of a cloud-based system mean that
communities that are far from a hospital or healthcare facility
can tap on a network link to “see” a doctor and share
information remotely. Empowered by online matching
technologies, new services are expanding the medical care
choices and personnel that these remote communities have
access to.
(C) CONNECTED USERS AND PATIENTS
Increasingly tech-savvy consumers are seeking transparency,
control and access to information when they interact with
healthcare institutions.Cloud technologies can provide this to
users anytime, anywhere, by presenting information in easy-to-
use formats and enabling self-service transactions, where
possible. Key to success here is the reach, agility and portability
of information.
(D)THE CLOUD EMPOWERS FIRST RESPONDERS
In an emergency, the resilience and scalability of the cloud are
qualities that have proven critical. From providing the
communications tools to first responders to uplifting the
recovery efforts following the immediate aftermath, cloud-
based systems have made a real difference in the real world.
Reducing the points of failure has been key to relief efforts.
(E) IMPROVING CARE ATTHE HOSPITAL
A well-run hospital is one where staff work closely together to
provide the best patient care.Today’s cloud-based systems for
the healthcare sector provide large-scale administration and
financial management, as well as patient information and
clinical data management. Offering unified, real-time insights,
they are transforming processes and providing measurable
benefits to patients.
(F) SCALING UP FOR PHARMACEUTICAL R&D
Data is key to the pharmaceutical industry, particularly in the
R&D sector where new treatments require many years of field
trials to discover. Cloud technologies, with the scalability,
reliability and compliance they provide, enable more
sophisticated management and analysis of such large data sets.
They are making a difference in how fast results are delivered.
Hinweis der Redaktion
Good morning everybody, I’m Evelyn, and I will be talking about cloud and the healthcare industry today. The idea to present on healthcare and cloud came about because the association I work with has been preparing a report on healthcare, with case studies on cloud usage in different sub-verticals of the healthcare stream. The healthcare industry encompasses: hospitals, healthcare facilities, telemedicine, and others.
I’m an economic analyst by training, so I don’t have the technical knowledge on cloud, but would like to share with you my thoughts on what I think motivates the shift cloud has experienced in the healthcare industry. Before I share my thoughts, let me share some statistics with you.
Everyone likes statistics, so let’s first start by talking about the size of the cloud market in the healthcare industry. Technavio, a research firm, reports that it expects healthcare to grow by 21% per on average per year in the next 4 years. That means that by 2021, the size of healthcare will grow from US7.7 billion to about US$16billion.
Besides that, among SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, SaaS has shown the highest increase in growth, and will continue to lead growth in the next 4 years.
IDC predicts that after healthcare is the second biggest sector to lead IT spending from 2015-2020, after the banking sector. Now what leads to motivations to adopt cloud in the healthcare sector?
What has motivated the change in the healthcare industry?
What has motivated the change from storing medical records, to storing them digitally, either on offsite data centres, or the cloud?
I see two components that motivate such change. The first is the swift pace of technological changes, and the second, is change in the healthcare industry.
These technological changes affect all industries like financial services, commercial & retail, manufacturing… I’m just going to go through them briefly here.
Cloud computing – has become affordable at a fast enough pace for large scale adoption
Cost of cloud computing (IMPT)
Using cloud has become very affordable, which has motivated the shift towards outsourcing storage systems, especially since healthcare institutions have high volume of data
Scalability & elasticity
Usage of cloud can be as much as you want, and as low as you like. It can be done on-demand, which means users can purchase a huge amount of cloud in February, but scale down in March, if they do not see the need.
Capex and opex
This means that instead of purchasing fix servers, storage and compute can be done via cloud
Which means that [transference of] Responsibility & technical skills – giving the technical skills to the cloud providers, instead of developing in-house team
Healthcare changes
Change in mindset
The medical profession has always been bounded by curative care. The study of medicine is essentially finding enough symptoms to come up with a diagnosis, meaning it is only when there is a problem¸ that people find medical professionals. Even in the Hippocratic oath which doctors swear to – preventive care is not mentioned or not a focus.
However, the momentum that transits from curative to preventive care, empowered by technology, has been astounding. More and more hospitals and healthcare providers are open to using preventive systems as part of their care. This shows patient empowerment.
Healthhub platform in Singapore: this is a platform launched by the Ministry of Health in Singapore, which allows patients and caregivers to track medication and hospital visits. It gives users tips on how to eat healthily, with the ability to earn reward points and provide deals to healthy meals and fitness activities.
The Liberalisation of knowledge has also been amazing – knowledge no longer just kept with doctor, it can be accessed by patients, and rather reliable knowledge
Another big shift in mindset in the healthcare industry is data sharing:
Allowing data sharing across departments – eg: with physician, physiotherapist, surgeon, etc. openness of each department to do so, empowered by technology.
For example, Fortis Healthcare in India, uses the Microsoft Azure platform to communicate among employees in the hospitals. This means that instead of the knowledge the doctor has and keeps for him or herself – that knowledge is also shared with the neurosurgeon or physiotherapist or radiologist. Plus it means you don’t need to read the horrible scribbles that doctors write.
But what I find as the most facinating piece in the adoption of cloud in the healthcare sector is one simple thing: solving the problem of communication
Healthcare & Technological changes
Put “location” and “communication” photo side-by-side.
Location photo: doctor treating patient
Communication photo: making a phone call
Healthcare is one of those sectors that are typically bounded by location. Let’s say you are feeling very ill, and you want to see a general practitioner – you don’t go to the best doctor in the world, you go to the doctor that is physically closest to you and is trustworthy enough. Ambulances always bring you to the nearest hospital. And so, if anyone needs medical attention now, I’ll dial 995, and an ambulance will come and bring you to the Singapore General Hospital, which is the nearest public hospital.
That means only those who live near to healthcare facilities or hospitals can access medical services. Those who live farther away will be at a disadvantaged. And has lower chances of receiving care.
.
Communication – this affects other sectors as well, but communication piece in healthcare has affected people who previously couldn’t get access to medical care
but when you couple the unequal distribution of doctors to localities, with the power of communication that has affected many of the sectors, you solve a business gap. You bring access of healthcare to millions that would never have a chance to see a doctor if not for the advances in communication.
– you only see a physicist that is near you. But technological changes have empowered healthcare to transcend physical boundaries
It affects both developed and developing countries in Asia
Eg: emergency services in the Japan earthquake
Eg: Medifi, Philippines: Using the scale and reach of Azure cloud technology, Medifi has built a platform that enables patients to seek online consultation, regardless of their geographic location. They can use a video chatting tool to communicate their illnesses to the doctor. These sessions are particularly useful for sessions that do not require physical examination.
This is not just a service used by developing countries, which typically have lower doctor-to-patient ratio.
Eg: ReadyCare, Australia: This is similar to the Medifi system. Patients can share images with doctors during the consultation, and can follow up with them via chat after the consultation. This allows for continuity of care.
Eg: ViCare
Cost vs security – how much should I spend on data storage? How secure is it if I store data offsite? Hospitals are very concerned when patient data gets leaked out, because they are confidential, because if say I know how sick the Prime Minister of Singapore is, the economy will be de-strablise.
On the other hand, cloud is much cheaper than storing data on-site.
So frequently, healthcare facilities are stuck with this dilemma, especially in terms of data storage.
But that doesn’t mean that they are not open to cloud. You have seen the transformation I’ve showed in this presentation. Change in mindset in storage of data IS happening, just much slower than the shift in mindset for curative to preventive care.
So in summary, what I want to show is this: healthcare industry has been rapidly adopting cloud solutions. However, the healthcare industry is not uniform. There has been rapid adoption of cloud computing in the remote health and EMR sections, but it the argument between cost and security is still a main contention in the healthcare industry. Some of the case studies and issues I’ve talked about today will be highlighted in the ACCA’s Healthcare report, which will be launched in March. I look forward to your feedback if any.
Thank you.