4 Advantages of Cloud Data Management in Healthcare

After a few years of lagging behind most commercial sectors, the healthcare industry has begun a swift adoption of cloud services. As of 2022, 83% of healthcare organizations report using cloud computing and storage services in their core operations. With increasingly clear benefits in patient outcomes and at the bottom line, cloud data management in healthcare is on the cusp of rapid growth in the coming decade. 

Increasing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.8%, the global value of the healthcare cloud service market will rise from $39.4 billion in Q2 of 2022 to $89.4 billion by the end of 2027. Various convergent factors are currently fueling this hastened growth period, including:

• An increased need for remote healthcare or telehealth solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Improvements in predictive data analytics and machine learning insights
• A new influx of patient health data from wearable devices enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT)
• Nearly all cloud service providers now offer on-demand scalability 

In this transition period, healthcare organizations will adapt according to their sizes and immediate needs. Nevertheless, decision-makers in all industry divisions should keep an eye on cloud service trends for new applications in their respective systems. In this guide, you’ll learn about cloud data management and its advantages in the healthcare industry. 

Key Takeaways:

• The healthcare industry is embracing cloud services and data management.
• Cloud data management orchestrates cloud service platforms to enable data integration and security. 
• Applying cloud data management in healthcare affords organizations advantages in patient outcomes and operational efficiency. 

What Is Cloud Data Management?

The term ‘cloud’ in IT refers to non-local or offsite computing and data storage services. The cloud contrasts with traditionally business-owned servers and computers physically located in a private workspace. Cloud resources may be public, private, or a hybrid arrangement of the two. In public clouds, the service provider designs the service architecture, maintains all systems and hardware and allocates shared resources to clients as needed in a multi-tenant arrangement. In private clouds, the service provider leases propriety storage and computing resources to clients who then orchestrate the systems themselves, isolated from other cloud tenants by various virtualization techniques.

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Cloud data management is securing, storing, and organizing data across multiple cloud platforms, with or without coordination with onsite IT resources. While it is possible for an organization to use a single public or private cloud, such an arrangement does not meet the needs of most businesses. As of 2022, 89% of organizations have adopted multi-cloud service architectures, and 80% of those are public-private hybrids. 

The use of cloud services is a kind of IT infrastructure outsourcing. Clients pay service providers instead of designing, purchasing, and maintaining their IT hardware and software resources. Because cloud service providers offer storage and computing resources on-demand, businesses can purchase only what they need, scaling rapidly up or down in size as circumstances warrant. For most, this arrangement cuts costs – no resources idling when not needed – while enhancing overall data security and durability and easing the burden of keeping highly-skilled full-time IT staff. 

These benefits apply in nearly all use cases for organizations of almost any size. Nevertheless, businesses are responsible for managing their costs and orchestrating necessary levels of integration between different cloud platforms. Accurately estimating an organization’s day-to-day cloud service needs and ensuring data security and inter-platform availability are the primary tasks of cloud data management. Without a cloud data management plan, organizations relying on multi-cloud strategies will run up costs and inefficiencies simultaneously and be unable to extract value from the data they capture in different systems. 

Cloud Data Management in Healthcare: 4 Advantages for All Organizations

With its compliance obligations to patient data privacy and billing transparency – as articulated in regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the No Surprises Act – healthcare is a unique industry with specific data management needs. At the same time, healthcare organizations are businesses sharing common operational requirements with other commercial enterprises. The advantages of cloud data management in healthcare are an admixture of shared and unique solutions.

1. Scalability and Flexibility

As of 2022, every patient in the U.S. healthcare system generates 80 megabytes of data in formats such as electronic health records (EHRs) and medical imaging every year. Additionally, this generation rate will hit a sustained CAGR of 36% by 2025. IT professionals cannot expect onsite hardware and server management to accommodate this parabolic growth. Leveraging cloud scalability is the only solution for meeting capacity requirements while controlling costs.

2. Prevention of Catastrophic Data Loss

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On-premise data storage exposes organizations to the risk of catastrophic data loss through hardware destruction. Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services guarantee 99.999999999% object durability and 99.99% availability through multiple instances in different geographic regions. 

3. Interoperability and Collaboration

Effective cloud data management creates greater interoperability between systems and ultimately puts more decision-driving data in the hands of care providers. With access to a broader spectrum of patient data, care providers can make data-driven decisions and improve patient outcomes. Better data visibility also extends to collaboration between care providers at different points of patient contact. 

4. Enabling Analytics and Machine Learning Applications

Managed data is accessible. Orchestrating cloud platform integrations to ensure the entirety of an organization’s data is structured and persisted in a single repository enables predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms that can transform data into actionable insights. Healthcare organizations are already using such applications to identify early intervention cases, costly hospital overstays, population-level trends, and single-point false positives in testing and diagnostics.

Comprehensive Healthcare Data Management With Coperor by Gaine

Gaine’s Coperor master data management platform for healthcare organizations brings industry-first, scalable data management solutions to healthcare’s unique challenges. With an unrivaled capacity to create a single source of truth from multiple cloud data sources within your organization and its contracted partners, Coperor drives improved healthcare delivery and operational efficiency throughout your organization.

To learn more and schedule a live demo, contact Gaine today.