In my last post, I talked about the impact of cloud computing on the media industry. We saw how cloud computing has helped launch products faster to market as well as reduced cost for media companies. In this post let’s sneak into how healthcare industry has been impacted with this growing technology.
Cloud’s usage for patient data analysis results in faster access to patient’s data throughout the facility and increase efficiency of staff. As a result there is improved delivery of care. This was observed at Seattle Children’s Hospital in Seattle, WA.
Dr. Michael Cunningham, medical director of Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Craniofacial Center, treats young patients suffering from craniosynostosis, a disease which has the potential to cause brain damage. This disease seems to be caused by abnormality of how bone cells communicate.
With the advent of cloud computing, quicker and less expensive R&D translates to less expensive drug. This is evident as Matt Wood, head of scientific and technical computing at Amazon Web Services, mentioned one example of a customer who wanted to run a virtual screening of 21 million chemical compounds.
“We have customers that are running very large-scale drug discovery pipelines,” said Wood. Additionally, he said, “so it really is transformative in the way that it can accelerate the drug discovery process, in the way that it can accelerate the scientific discovery process.”
According to Wood, if the company had tried to complete that project with its own computing power, it would have taken years to complete and would have cost millions of dollars. However with cloud technology, the whole experiment took about just three hours at a cost of less than $15,000.
Not only have for profit organizations benefited from cloud computing; such technology has proven significant advantages for non-profit organizations. Colleagues In Care, a non-profit organization providing healthcare services, showed that by storing information on the cloud, collaboration between specialists and clinicians becomes easier and effective.
Using IBM’s SmartCloud Engage, cloud-based solution and collaboration services, organization provides the global network of healthcare volunteers with immediate access to critical data and information for the current healthcare needs of the Haitian citizens.
The video talks about how the situation in Haiti improved by using IBM smart cloud. Doctors can now immediately determine how to best care for the patient and collaborate with colleagues to determine more population-based strategies of effective care.
In today’s landscape, hospitals and health systems are continuously striving to offer new services and benefits to referring physicians so that they don’t lose patient referrals to competing providers. With cloud services, such as private-label email, hospitals and healthcare systems can provide domain names with secure email to physicians at a very low cost, while creating a channel for loyalty.
The Case Study – Advocate Health Care explains how Advocate Health Care, the largest healthcare provider in Illinois, saved US $4 million by moving email to cloud.
Advocate Health care provided nearly 29,000 employees with subscription to Microsoft Exchange Online, a cloud-based email service from Microsoft. This allowed the company to immediately access the latest email software and offered a foundation on which it could add technologies that contribute to better patient care. As a result of which, it avoided spending US $4 million on a new email infrastructure. The IT staff spends far less time administering email and Advocate enjoys improved business continuity.
Given the benefits discussed above, there is certainly a huge potential for cloud computing in healthcare industry.
According to MarketsandMarkets report “Healthcare Cloud Computing Market – Global Trends, Challenges, Opportunities & Forecasts,” the global healthcare cloud computing market is projected to increase to a value of $5.4 billion by 2017. Increasingly more cloud-computing players including SalesForce, Amazon, Dell, IBM and GE are offering health care solutions in the cloud to address the needs of the health sector.
Let’s see how Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies has envisioned the future of health care cloud computing.
Cloud helps to create a network between patients, doctors, and healthcare institutions by providing applications and services and also by maintaining the data on the cloud. It provides an infrastructure that allows hospitals, medical practices, insurance companies, and research facilities to use improved computing resources at lower initial capital expenditures. Medical professionals can now share and promote information amongst others in similar fields in different locations.
Cloud Computing is saving both time and money for the healthcare industry. According to the NPR’s “All Tech Considered” report, the computing power of cloud is making it easier as well less expensive for companies and clinicians to discover new drugs and medical treatments. Analyzing data that used to take years and millions of dollars can now be done quickly and at low cost.
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Dr. Michael Cunningham, medical director of Seattle Children’s Hospital’s Craniofacial Center, treats young patients suffering from craniosynostosis, a disease which has the potential to cause brain damage. This disease seems to be caused by abnormality of how bone cells communicate.
He says that researchers were able to identify such patients whose cells looked similar by using cloud computing to analyze vast amounts of data. Cunningham added that crunching, analyzing and sequencing vast data would have been far too expensive and would have taken too long without cloud computing. He strongly believes that cloud computing will help in coming up with better treatments.
With the advent of cloud computing, quicker and less expensive R&D translates to less expensive drug. This is evident as Matt Wood, head of scientific and technical computing at Amazon Web Services, mentioned one example of a customer who wanted to run a virtual screening of 21 million chemical compounds.
“We have customers that are running very large-scale drug discovery pipelines,” said Wood. Additionally, he said, “so it really is transformative in the way that it can accelerate the drug discovery process, in the way that it can accelerate the scientific discovery process.”
According to Wood, if the company had tried to complete that project with its own computing power, it would have taken years to complete and would have cost millions of dollars. However with cloud technology, the whole experiment took about just three hours at a cost of less than $15,000.
Not only have for profit organizations benefited from cloud computing; such technology has proven significant advantages for non-profit organizations. Colleagues In Care, a non-profit organization providing healthcare services, showed that by storing information on the cloud, collaboration between specialists and clinicians becomes easier and effective.
Using IBM’s SmartCloud Engage, cloud-based solution and collaboration services, organization provides the global network of healthcare volunteers with immediate access to critical data and information for the current healthcare needs of the Haitian citizens.
The video talks about how the situation in Haiti improved by using IBM smart cloud. Doctors can now immediately determine how to best care for the patient and collaborate with colleagues to determine more population-based strategies of effective care.
In today’s landscape, hospitals and health systems are continuously striving to offer new services and benefits to referring physicians so that they don’t lose patient referrals to competing providers. With cloud services, such as private-label email, hospitals and healthcare systems can provide domain names with secure email to physicians at a very low cost, while creating a channel for loyalty.
The Case Study – Advocate Health Care explains how Advocate Health Care, the largest healthcare provider in Illinois, saved US $4 million by moving email to cloud.
Advocate Health care provided nearly 29,000 employees with subscription to Microsoft Exchange Online, a cloud-based email service from Microsoft. This allowed the company to immediately access the latest email software and offered a foundation on which it could add technologies that contribute to better patient care. As a result of which, it avoided spending US $4 million on a new email infrastructure. The IT staff spends far less time administering email and Advocate enjoys improved business continuity.
Given the benefits discussed above, there is certainly a huge potential for cloud computing in healthcare industry.
According to MarketsandMarkets report “Healthcare Cloud Computing Market – Global Trends, Challenges, Opportunities & Forecasts,” the global healthcare cloud computing market is projected to increase to a value of $5.4 billion by 2017. Increasingly more cloud-computing players including SalesForce, Amazon, Dell, IBM and GE are offering health care solutions in the cloud to address the needs of the health sector.
Let’s see how Siemens Corporate Research and Technologies has envisioned the future of health care cloud computing.
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