Amid pandemic turbulence, moving to the Cloud is imperative, but the healthcare industry needs to ensure how the DX is orchestrated.

Over the last decade, particularly in the current coronavirus pandemic, the protection and handling of customer data has been specifically regulated in many countries across the globe.

This has significantly impacted healthcare organizations in how they are adapting to the new demands and hampered change and innovation, particularly with regard to data management. The way healthcare organizations manage and secure their networks is critical.

However, there are a number of challenges when adopting a single and hybrid cloud architecture: One is network and security complexity, in terms of connecting to the Cloud, and having consistency across clouds. Another is visibility and troubleshooting, which includes the lack of monitoring and automated solutions by cloud providers. These issues are amplified by healthcare personnel skills gaps.

Healthcare in the regional cloud

In South-east Asia, both Singapore and Malaysia are at the forefront of utilizing cloud as part of their ongoing healthcare digitalization efforts due to the cost efficiencies and security benefits.

In 2019, Singapore launched the Healthcare-Cloud (H-Cloud) that services over 50,000 healthcare staff across the island-state. The H-Cloud allows public healthcare institutions to deploy application systems in a faster, cheaper, and greener way as compared to traditional methods.

In Malaysia, the Hospital Integrated System has been upgraded, with cloud-enabled systems and real-time data management functions integrated into the country’s Integrated Primary Care System.

Regionally, to stay in tandem with the evolving digital transformation of healthcare systems in the region, industry professionals have to continuously upgrade and equip themselves with in-demand skills such as:

  • being able to evaluate the relative value of new health technologies versus the standard of care based on current clinical and economic evidence, to inform policy and clinical decision-making
  • fluency in data analytics to make fact-based decisions for healthcare service planning, patient/client management and disease monitoring during the preventative, treatment as well as the recovery phases
  • familiarity with telemedicine capabilities and ability to leverage cloud capabilities to improve telehealth administration such as post-discharge care plans; ensuring patient compliance with medication routines; and awareness of data management priorities in telehealth such as data protection, data sharing and privacy compliance

When moving to the cloud, the industry will need to keep a close eye on continual training of healthcare personnel and intensive talent recruitment, training and retention to bridge the skills gaps amid a global shift in human resource priorities.

Orchestrating healthcare digital transformation

The widespread adoption in healthcare goes far beyond just storing data on cloud architecture.

The sector is now leveraging the technology to gain efficiencies, optimize workflows, lower the costs associated with healthcare delivery, and offer personalization in care plans to improve outcomes.

As hospitals and healthcare providers do not need to purchase hardware and servers outright, they can focus on using the strengths of cloud computing to maintain Electronic Medical Records, manage the plethora of healthcare apps and wearables, and share critical data quickly with other institutions to provide continuity of medical care.

Also, healthcare organizations on a multi-cloud strategy can fully harness the power of the cloud by taking advantage of best-of-breed services. For instance, a healthcare provider may be using Amazon Web Services for its compute services and Oracle Cloud for its database solutions. These organizations have the freedom to use more than one cloud provider as their business and IT needs evolve, but will need to be able to orchestrate and interwork them efficiently.

This is where healthcare cloud solutions providers can help: their systems can log records of all aspects of change management functions (which is a systematic approach to dealing with the transition or transformation of an organization’s goals, processes or technologies) as well as incidents for review and make all the data available for reporting, analysis and strategy formulation.

Cloud complexities ahead

All in all, with a multi-cloud strategy, the healthcare industry can mitigate risks associated with infrastructure meltdown or an attack. They can quickly move their data and applications to another cloud provider or use it as a backup for disaster recovery. Security features can also be implemented to ensure a robust risk management system that is well integrated into the multi-cloud network.

Looking into the future, it is imperative that healthcare organizations not only adopt cloud technology, but also understand how to leverage it to accelerate digital transformation. Complexity is only set to increase in the sector, as new innovations and developments require new regulations and security guidelines. With an innovative and comprehensive cloud networking solution, healthcare enterprises can seize this opportunity today, to meet the needs of patients tomorrow.