By Venky Ananth, EVP and Global Head of Healthcare, Infosys
Over the past few years, the healthcare industry in Europe has been grappling with challenges around ageing populations, increasing healthcare costs, and a scarcity of skilled personnel.
Traditionally, healthcare has been lagging behind other industries with respect to cloud adoption.
This is understandable given concerns about data privacy and the need to safeguard Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Given the complex nature of healthcare processes, the focus has been (rightly) on care rather than efficiency or profitability. As a result, the pace of change has been relatively slow in healthcare.
As cloud technology evolves, it can offer several solutions to transform the healthcare industry and address the challenges impacting healthcare, while overcoming concerns around security.
As the benefits become obvious, more healthcare enterprises are embarking on digitisation and cloud journeys.
In most cases, the initial approach, especially on the payer side, has been focused on ‘lift and shift’ approaches that prioritise elasticity and cost versus capability and business transformation.
On the provider side, the availability of more off-the-shelf products has encouraged cloud adoption.
There is a growing realisation on the payer side that the true value of the cloud is derived from building new-age capabilities powered by AI and other emerging technologies.
This requires a well-thought-out cloud-native approach that redefines processes and workflows for the digital world. In most cases, while digitisation efforts are focused on front-end operations, the back-end operations still largely operate on legacy systems.
Therefore, it is critical to build a business case for cloud adoption and move from a cost-saving mindset towards an innovation-focused attitude.
Cloud lays the foundation of several new-age digital services that could make healthcare accessible to vast populations.
For instance, telemedicine can help extend the reach of healthcare to remote areas where physicians might not be present in large numbers.
Some of the benefits that healthcare can accrue by moving to the cloud include:
Greater access and reach
Digitisation of healthcare helps improve the quality of healthcare by reducing wait-times, allowing for remote consultation, and ensuring that help is at hand in the case of emergencies.
In Germany, electronic patient records are transforming healthcare through the digitisation and automation of storage and analysis of health data.
The benefits of digitisation extend across all stakeholders in healthcare, from patients and doctors to hospitals and health insurance companies.
Streamlining of processes
Digitisation and cloud lay the foundation for the use of AI in automating processes, streamlining them, and drastically improving efficiency.
Cloud-driven generative AI has the potential to enable a range of innovations by bringing unprecedented intelligence into medical devices thereby empowering medical staff with far superior insights.
Diagnostic assistants can support healthcare professionals to work faster and with greater accuracy.
On payer side cloud-based solutions can help not only improve the business core efficiencies but can also help enhance and bring in scalability in sales and marketing functions for driving personalised campaigns and accelerate lead conversion process.
Personalisation and enhanced quality of care
Enhanced patient care and management platforms can independently deliver services to patients.
This, in turn, allows medical professionals to focus their attention on providing an empathetic experience and handling exceptional cases that require human intervention.
Data sharing between devices, coupled with AI models, can enable highly personalised approaches to care.
Focus on longevity and wellness
A cloud-based approach coupled with digital tools allows for a greater focus on preventative healthcare and longevity-driven approaches, supported by AI-based insights by AI and data to study circumstances that could lead to emergent conditions.
The power cloud in conjunction with AI/ generative AI tools can transform elder care. Elders within the population typically require more frequent medical interventions in order to ensure a good quality of life.
However, a large quantum of medical care for seniors is focused on preventive actions, palliative care, and management of chronic diseases. Remote care can allow seniors to avail top quality medical care and guidance from the comfort of their homes.
Cloud as the backbone
These AI-based applications require cloud-based infrastructure in the backend, in addition to a deep connection to business strategy, customer experience, and employee experience.
Cloud technologies can help improve the availability and quality of health data and data exchange through an interoperable standardised care ecosystem.
This will further improve the care outcomes by reducing manual medical errors.
While a move to the cloud is inevitable for the healthcare industry, a few key considerations are important. The most critical is compliance.
The healthcare industry is governed by a myriad of regulations since the security of personal data is of utmost importance.
In fact, cloud solutions can also help provide robust security measures to protect health data. The other factors are enhancing end-user experience and access to care.
Across industries, experience is becoming a key differentiator in an increasingly commoditised world.
Building the right business case for cloud adoption is crucial to building a cloud strategy that prioritises not just doing the same things with new technologies but doing them differently with an eye on reimagining the healthcare experience.
