Why are Healthcare and Life Science Companies Moving to the Cloud?

Some technologies are so powerful they disrupt and change entire ways of working and doing business across industries and society. The emergence of automobiles, commercial flight, telephones, internet, and mobile phones changed the way we live, work and play. And now, the Cloud is doing the same.

What is the Cloud? At its core, the Cloud, or rather Cloud technology, is merely the concept that content (information) and applications exist somewhere in the internet (“the Cloud”) and we can access it on devices (computers, tablets, phones) instantaneously from anywhere so long as we have internet access.

There are a number of benefits that organizations can experience from moving to the Cloud, such as:

• Reduced CapEx: Moving to the Cloud eliminates the need for massive upfront spending on IT infrastructure that ties up working capital.
• Reduced OpEx: When you move to the Cloud, you can reduce internal IT costs and manpower by enlisting your cloud service provider to protect and maintain the infrastructure that runs all of the offered services.
• Improved efficiency of operations: Moving to the Cloud makes it possible to pay only for storage, applications and processing capacity needed. Given the dynamic, fast-changing world we live in today, it is important that organizations are able to scale up and down to meet demand as needed without large, upfront capital expenditures.

Within the context of Healthcare and Life Sciences companies, the Cloud is categorized into Clinical Information System (CIS), Non-clinical Information System (NCIS), and life sciences applications. There are many very compelling reasons as why adopting cloud solutions within these particular industries makes sense. Moving your healthcare or life sciences company to the cloud can enable you to:

• Improve collaboration: Moving to the Cloud makes real-time collaborative workflows possible. Different organizations, such as research institutes and medical offices, can collaborate on the same studies with centrally managed data. Health records can be shared between a general practitioner and a specialist, if needed. The possibilities are even greater with the promise of 5G networks and the Internet of Things.
• Boost R&D: Moving to the Cloud opens up huge opportunities for healthcare and life sciences companies to utilize deep data mining and real time analytics to further research and speed up operations for a variety of tasks, such as determining eligible participants for case studies and clinical trials.
• Maintain Data Integrity: Healthcare and life sciences companies are under strict monitoring by regulatory bodies, and AWS is committed to working with companies in these industries to ensure they meet all compliance standards. In fact, AWS updated a whitepaper in January 2019 about this very topic, titled “Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services.”
• Enhance Interoperability: Most healthcare and life sciences companies have siloed systems in place that do not offer seamless workflow and intuitive navigation. Moving to the cloud affords better exchange of data between different divisions and across organizations.
• Leverage IoT: Patient data is constantly growing across various internet-connected clinical devices and clinically-enabled consumer devices such as home monitors, implanted medical devices, wearables, and so on. Having all that information tapped into the cloud provides valuable 360° analytics for AI algorithms.

The Bigger Picture

According to MarketsandMarkets, the North American Healthcare and Life Sciences cloud computing market alone will be worth 11.43 Billion USD by 2020, because companies are seeing the value in moving to the Cloud.

As the world grows increasingly accustomed to accessing information on the go, the only way to retain customers and employees is by adapting to the way they live and work and consume — and that is through the Cloud. If you work with a trusted partner like Mission, we can help you improve efficiency, maintain compliance and security, and foster innovation across your healthcare or life science team.