Up in the Cloud: Discussing Healthcare Clouds
We will examine the possible design opportunities and dangers of healthcare clouds, and close by sharing some of the driving forces that informed these opportunities
Up in the Cloud
The storage, consumption, and sharing of data is an important part of the healthcare industry that should continue to be optimized to ensure a secure and knowledgeable experience for patients, physicians, and other healthcare administrators and providers. From conventional storage to effective digital platforms, the healthcare industry is beginning to adopt cloud technology into their business model. Healthcare clouds is a cloud computing service used by healthcare providers for storing, maintaining, and backing up personal medical information. Having a single access point to patient information promotes better collaboration between all parties involved in the healthcare experience and allows more focus on enhancing patient care and treatment plans.
Applying Design
Near-Term (12 Months)
Opportunities
- Making lives better and easier: Well-designed healthcare clouds should make physicians’ lives easier by absolving them of any business administration responsibilities of the job and allowing them to direct their focus on delivering better quality of care
- Insightful data: Patients will feel they are receiving more valuable insights from their personal data and information, which encourages the opportunity for positive behavioral health changes
- Saving Costs: Successfully designed platforms using cloud technology should permit healthcare institutions to store, manage, and analyze all data enough to save costs on extra physical servers most facilities depend on
Dangers
- Data Hungry: Companies can become more focused on the data gathering itself rather than the analysis and understanding of quality data
- Reliability of data: Mistrust and skepticism among patients, physicians, administrators, and other key healthcare players in regards to data security, reliability, and privacy
Long-Term (3+ Years)
Opportunities
- Personalized Data: Successful and well-designed platforms are taking hyper data as an advantage to make the healthcare journey more personalized for both patients and physicians
- Connection beyond data: Cloud technology in healthcare can create a beneficial relationship between data collection and its users by considering the type of data collected, questioning its usefulness, and inquiring feedback from patients to enhance personalization
- Double Engagement: Designers should create a form of double engagement, where people with improved health from the use of personal data can then share strategic data to healthcare providers and insurance companies
Dangers
- Weak Security: Poorly designed platforms implement weak security measures to address the concerns about security, data breaches, and privacy
- No trust: Fail to maintain and guarantee a level of trust among all clients, including physicians, patients, and healthcare administrators
- Liability claims: A poorly designed platform could display wrong information or provide questionable recommendations for physicians, leading to liability problems healthcare institutions aim to avoid
Driving Forces
Absolving Administration from Physicians
Comprehensive Finance, Inc. (CFI) is an innovative cloud-based payment processing system for healthcare providers, such as dentists, plastic surgeons, audiologists, and other specialists. Secure, safe, and convenient, CFI utilizes cloud technology to provide rapid decisions and payment processing for a variety of physicians and healthcare administrators. CFI also displays real-time analytics for clients to track real-time results and maximize profitability. With CFI handling the well-known challenges and frustrations payments create for physicians, the company’s cloud-based system allows providers to direct all of their focus on patient care rather than on administrative duties.
Education, Industrials, and the Cloud
Since the healthcare field has historically shown to lag behind other industries in optimization and reform, cloud adoption has definitely reached other sectors. Samsara is an up-and-coming startup that offers telematics, connected driver, safety, SCADA, monitoring, and other products and services that are related to the industrial IoT. Serving over 15,000 companies, Samsara drives its attention on using cloud computing to provide integrated solutions to transportation across a variety of industries, including education, government, construction, and public transportation.
Samsara’s recent partnership with Edulog, an industry leader with massive experience in North American school districts, collaborated to deliver a solution to student transportation during the pandemic. Together, the two companies planned socially distant routes with Samsara ID Card Readers and real-time GPS tracking, as well as developed the Parent Portal app to deliver real-time and accurate data to the students’ parents.
Cloud Scalability
Cockroach Labs developed CockroachDB, an enterprise-grade distributed SQL database that assists organizations in moving and managing critical transactional information in the cloud. The goal of CockroachDB is to have a database that is distributed as much as the applications and services of a company. CockroachDB is ACID compliant, scales globally without the need for a massive architectural overhaul, and manages and distributes replicas of data to ensure reliability. Not only CockroachDB is the only database that enables users to attach “location” to their data at the row level, but the company has also worked with plenty of market leaders of their respective industries, including Bose, Lush, and Netflix. Due to their success in raising over $80 million in a series D financing led by Altimeter Capital and tech investment firm BOND, Cockroach Labs is planning to invest more into product development and design to upgrade their current products and transition from cloud-sourced platforms to a more scalable and elastic multi-cloud platform.
