The age of cloud has taken over all of us and that too quite significantly. After all, gone are the days when the process of decision making was intuitive rather than based on actual facts and records. More than any other, the healthcare industry has been the one to face the wrath of such an inefficiency more than ever.
Think about it in this manner. Today organizations and enterprises no matter which niche of the business they fall into are leveraging the power of big data analytics solutions services for decision making. Hey are diving down into the customer’s data to answer questions like what are the current market trends, which products are the best buys during a particular season, how will the demands rise in the near future, and more. While this is just the tip of the iceberg, there’s more to what meets the eye in the Big data analysis of the ordinary business.
Healthcare and Data: The New Best Friends
However, when you come to the healthcare industry, you hardly find decisions being taken with strong empirical evidence. Medical personnel are still performing intuitive diagnosis and taking decisions based on their gut rather than something that is backed with strong data. Be it deciding the course of the treatment for a patient or analyzing their radiological image, there are more than enough areas in healthcare in day to day life, where decision making might have a few loopholes.
However, when one sees them in light of the data, new findings are observed. For example, this would mean analyzing more than a few thousand radiological images to understand the root cause of a problem. So, when a new radiological X-ray, MRI, or CT scan arrives, it already knows what is there to look for. Based on the thousands of parameters a neural network has self-examined without being explicitly programmed, they analyze and process information in a new case and generalize well.
We don’t say that this has to exist in isolation, but this can exist as a major enabler of technology assisting the doctors in actual decision making for a patient. After all, the ultimate aim of the healthcare system is to provide care services to the patient.Â
And regardless of the form they take, the ultimate beneficiaries have to be patients. With technology to the rescue, the process of decision making is taking a significant shift, resulting in a more superior diagnosis in the light of new information.Â
Data Sharing Enabling Tremendous Progress
In an exceptional case, for example, Google’s study on identifying breast cancer in women surpassed ordinary human medical staff. The algorithm was only fed chest X rays of around 70,000 women, while at the same time these images were shown to actual doctors along with other patient data such as the history of illness and more.Â
In clearly visible effects, the algorithm was able to perform better than the medical staff and surpass human intelligence. While this study was a real eye-opener, imagine how difficult it would have been to process all the information, have multiple teams work on the same, and do more in the absence of cloud.
Therefore, the cloud is one of the biggest examples that is easing interoperability among organizations in the healthcare industry. The point is if the technological deployment has to take place in the healthcare industry to take it to a new level, data has to be made accessible for the right stakeholders.
While taking adequate security measures, people have to make the best use of data, which might require more than one brain. Different disciplines and scientists of multiple backgrounds might need to come together in one place, in spite of large geographical boundaries. In such circumstances, only the cloud can offer the respite that healthcare needs.
Irrespective of the point of origin, data has to be widely shared in the industry without having to be a bottleneck. And there is more than ever potential for cloud to outperform in the healthcare industry. This is direct because the industry is generating data like never before. More and more patients are approaching a medical facility for a wide variety of reasons. It is generating the kind of data that can take research to the new level. The only bottleneck in the process is a data integration and seamless sharing.
With the latest cloud-based solutions, all the data integration and interoperability issues are put to the rest. The cloud platform performs separate spaces for organizations to carry out a variety of processes. For example, there is a traditional space for legacy transactional processing data that has formed the core of relational databases in the healthcare system until now.
While on the other hand, for organizations wanting to perform big data analytics services and store customer’s data that might include the medical history, medical records from the past, details of the current diagnosis, etc have a separate ensures. This ensures that one task stays independent of another while also integrating seamlessly whenever required.Â
This is directly helping organizations replace the need for on-premise infrastructure for data storage. Such a system didn’t just occupy a lot of physical space, but had high maintenance and involved a lot of costs. While this hurt healthcare organizations directly, it was also a bottleneck for them to start deploying rapid agile methodologies over their data.Â
However, with cloud solutions at the place, all this is out to the rest. Organizations can finally focus on what’s essential and optimize their costs only for the space they need. Finally, we have something in the place where healthcare organizations and scientists in the medical domain can finally concentrate on the end goals rather than being occupied in maintaining the big data platform.