Healthcare Organizations Need To Think Big When It Comes To Cloud
By David Dimond, Dell EMC
The thought of migrating to the cloud just a few years ago seemed a distant goal for most healthcare providers. But today, we’re witnessing an unprecedented acceleration of cloud adoption as the healthcare industry is forecasted to spend a staggering $17.6 billion on cloud solutions by 2021. In fact, 75 percent of healthcare organizations now believe that the deployment of a cloud operating model will lead to improved patient care delivery.
The fact is, we’re living in what is now being called a multi-cloud world—one that is brought on by the convergence of market drivers with organizational initiatives that are fueling digital transformation. A few that top the list include building out the connected health ecosystem through the expansion of mobile and IoT devices and Big Data for genomics and molecular medicine collaborations. The initiatives, when coupled with new value-based care initiatives, bring together both internal and external players in the industry through mergers and acquisitions (M&A).
What this all means for health IT is a new paradigm that can either unleash the potential that cloud holds for data sharing, improved collaboration and cost-effective scalability, or it can present a host of unwanted challenges. The time is now to think big.
Although each cloud journey is different for every healthcare organization, IT can maximize the value of cloud by following three critical stages—each geared toward leveraging a comprehensive multi-cloud approach to deliver improved caregiver productivity while enabling a new consumer-centric engagement tool, which will lead to streamlined clinical workflow and safer patient care delivery
Stage 1. Overcome those familiar roadblocks.
It wasn’t long ago, before the days of wide scale adoption of EMRs, when organizations were buying disparate applications for clinical and business workloads, each with their own licensing agreements, hardware, and limitations, essentially trapping data in silos. It took $35 billion in government funded incentives and several painstaking years to drive clinical systems from disjointed point solutions to becoming integrated EMR ecosystems. The same pattern of organic growth is at risk of being repeated once again if you look at how cloud capabilities are currently being acquired. Healthcare providers need to quickly define their multi-cloud model to bypass roadblocks we’ve seen in the past that can lead to increased cost, complexity, and risk:
- Shadow IT: leads to disjointed, hard to manage services.
- Hidden costs: moving data out of certain clouds may be costly, buyer beware.
- Vendor lock-in: can impede data mobility due to proprietary technologies, contract constraints, or both.
- Insufficient governance: not treating cloud with the same rigor as other technologies can lead to increased security risks.
- Data gaps and analytics invisibility: limited data governance and data provenance inconsistencies create diminished analytics capabilities.
Stage 2. Treat cloud for what it is—a strategy, not a destination.
Rethink how to manage a cloud portfolio, not as a single point solution, but rather as a comprehensive, multi-cloud operating approach that incorporates all cloud solutions, including private, hybrid, public, and specialty cloud.
Deploying a multi-cloud framework starts with an informed, cross-organizational business strategy, addressing all facets of the organization, including:
- Business: What are the key business and clinical opportunities, challenges, and priorities—such as better health outcomes at lower costs, or improved patient and provider engagement?
- Technical: What are the technology challenges standing in the way—such as needing real-time application and service integration and data protection across the entire healthcare customer continuum?
- Operational: What organizational or operational challenges might exist—such as having to meet specific regulatory or clinical workflow requirements?
- Financial: How do you currently approach technology from a financial perspective? Is there budget for new technology, or will it come from savings realized through improvements?
Stage 3. Develop a plan and layer capabilities
Organizations should plan for and execute their strategy deploying seven steps as outlined in Figure 1 to enable both clinical and business workloads to be securely stored, accessed, and shared in a reliable, resilient environment. Although many healthcare IT organizations have started on this journey as they operate as a broker of technology services, but they should not wait for the next wave of demands for provisioning and orchestrating these services across multiple clouds.
Thinking big about enabling organizations to leap ahead toward digital transformation requires multi-cloud technologies like consistent application platforms and cloud-native standards that can be leveraged to facilitate cross-cloud integration to provide secure data sharing and interoperability.
Time To Unleash Your Data And Ignite Innovation
With your multi-cloud framework in place, data is now free to move along the healthcare data pyramid (Figure 2) in a connected, intelligent, secure multi-cloud healthcare ecosystem. With that progression, data can effectively be converted into insight and action at the point of care and beyond by layering in technologies like elastic data platforms running advanced analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).
Transform Your Organization To Become A Digital Leader As A Collaborative, Connected Healthcare Organization
Making it through stage 3, healthcare organizations find themselves prepared to capitalize on the power of multi-cloud—making data both visible and mobile so that they become digitally-ready to innovate, and ultimately, prepared to deliver on the promise of customer value creation through improved and empowered patient care. Now that’s big!
About The Author
David Dimond is the Global Healthcare Innovation Officer for Dell EMC.