Cloud for Healthcare is Transforming the Industry — Here’s How

Healthcare managed service providers (MSPs) are transforming how the healthcare industry functions by helping organizations move to the cloud. For healthcare providers and other segments across the industry, cloud technology allows for greater efficiencies, optimized workflows, lowered costs and faster innovation.

By leveraging the technology of the cloud for healthcare, organizations protect and optimize critical data and infrastructure, solving complex problems that have historically been more challenging to address with on-premise, less efficient technologies. 

Here are five smart ways the cloud is transforming the healthcare industry and how your organization could benefit.

#1. Lessen the Burden on Your Staff

Moving to the cloud, for healthcare organizations, lightens the load on employees. No longer will your team need to manage a wide range of technological obligations, such as capacity planning, software licensing, hardware procurement, infrastructure monitoring, security patching, backups and more.

Traditionally, healthcare organizations have struggled to keep up with the pace of change in the industry while staying on top of evolving technology at the rate required to remain successful. When handling technology in-house, companies face the ongoing challenge of acquiring talent, developing capabilities, and retaining IT staff with the necessary expertise. 

When choosing a solution such as a managed private cloud, healthcare organizations benefit from having experts on-hand, doing the heavy lifting of building out and managing infrastructure according to your needs. Plus, they serve as an extension of your organization’s IT department.

With a solution such as a public cloud, healthcare MSPs design, deploy and manage robust infrastructure solutions that leverage the functionality of the cloud to achieve your desired business outcomes.

Moving to the cloud for healthcare solutions means managed service providers are there to help you effectively address the demands of your internal and external stakeholders without overextending your team’s capacity.

#2. Accelerate Speed to Market

Healthcare managed service providers help to accelerate speed to market by reducing development cycles, launching new products to meet aggressive timelines and scaling up or down as needed to meet demand.

In response to rising medical costs, the management of clinical and healthcare services increasingly relies on data-enabled decision making. Reliance on healthcare data, analytics and information services is likely to continuously grow, so cloud functionality will be even more important to stakeholders and integral to maintaining a competitive advantage. 

As processes become more standardized, aided by automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence, organizations will find cloud technology indispensable for meeting the requirements of an evolving healthcare ecosystem.

#3. Achieve Compliance Requirements

Moving to the cloud for healthcare allows you to achieve compliance requirements with more ease. The right MSP ensures environments are designed for HIPAA, PIPEDA and other provincial regulatory and organizational obligations on public and private cloud platforms.

It’s no secret that cybercriminals view the constantly growing flow of highly-sensitive personally identifiable information between healthcare providers and other segments within the healthcare ecosystem as a gold mine of data. This is precisely what the HIPAA compliance is designed to protect.

As compliance continues to be a tremendous burden to every healthcare organization, an MSP shares in the responsibility of protecting patient information and ensuring your data is safeguarded from threats.

Quality cloud solutions are secure and compliant by design, adhering to stringent controls to help mitigate risks that your business faces every day.

#4. Protect Against Downtime and Ensure Business Continuity

When healthcare workflows leverage technology to support core operational functions, such as patient safety, compliance, product development and administrative productivity, technology failures are not only inconvenient and inefficient, but also downright dangerous. 

Healthcare organizations need backups and protections for operating during system outages and unplanned downtime, which an MSP can handle. Specifically, the right MSP solution protects against interruptions, has proper backups and recovery services in place and ensures business continuity, all of which is critical for all healthcare providers.

#5. Prepare for the Future

To remain competitive and prepare for the future, healthcare services and technology companies must invest in developing the capabilities required to stay ahead of the rapidly changing healthcare environment. 

By engaging a partner who specializes in cloud for healthcare, organizations get the benefit of working with expert architects that are able to design unique, secure and compliant solutions based on specific business requirements while remaining cost-effective. 

A forward-thinking technology partner will start your engagement with a full cloud assessment of your existing IT architectural landscape and migration to determine exactly what you need to be positioned for success. With expert guidance, you benefit from continuous cost optimization while addressing operations concerns throughout the build and test phases, ensuring you have what you need to succeed now and in the future.

Keep Up With Market Changes

As more providers move to the cloud the need to keep up with the changes in the healthcare industry is amplified. 

Cloud solutions enable healthcare companies to concentrate on their core business with confidence while healthcare managed service providers handle IT infrastructure, accelerate go-to-market speed, enhance security, advance flexibility, and meet regulatory and compliance obligations.

With so much at stake, your organization can’t afford to be left behind.

To learn more about how Managed Cloud Services can help your Health Care organization keep up with rapid market shifts, contact us to learn more.

Carbon60 is an MSP dedicated to helping businesses maximize the performance and security of their core application infrastructure with an agnostic cloud approach using public and hosted private clouds.  A partner with both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, we have the experience and the expertise to support organizations wherever they might be on their cloud journey.