Adoption of cloud computing environments in healthcare has continuously increased over the years. Business intelligence, analytics, and big data, coming from the cloud, has improved operations, care quality, and cost savings. The infrastructure of the cloud has also provided greater benefits through lower initial capital outlays versus traditional IT systems.
According to a recent study, healthcare adoption of cloud will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 21.95 percent leading up to 2019. In the year 2014, the largest share of health cloud computing was held by North America, followed by Europe then Asia. Its predicted that the most rapid growth rate in healthcare cloud computing these coming years would come from North America.
The slow lead up to cloud adoption was partly due to concerns about compliance with national security and regulations, such as the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. From this, stakeholders in the healthcare cloud computing market have created clinical information systems, computerized physician order entry, and radiology information system. This has helped facilitate speedier access to data on either public, private, or hybrid cloud.
The need for integration of health data and analytics presented great value to cloud computing. Three types of services offered for healthcare cloud computing: infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and software-as-a-service.
Public requests for better quality healthcare facilities has driven the need for cloud computing integration. Global spending in the cloud market rose as governments increased healthcare IT spending and cloud created additional services. Cost savings use to be the main driver for operating in the cloud.
Now, the intelligence provided from big data analytics capabilities of the cloud, further fuels this motivation to move.
The Cloud Standards Customer Council produced a report worth reading on the “Impact of Cloud Computing on Healthcare”. It highlights the challenges and benefits presented to the healthcare industry by cloud computing. Looking to the future, our facilities will need to update their data networks and directly integrate technology with our healthcare. This will help the industry meet the demands for more higher quality and improved experiences.