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How Cloud Technology is used in Healthcare during COVID-19
How Cloud Technology is used in Healthcare during COVID-19

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There is now increasing recognition of the potential of cloud technologies, which provide data storage and computing resources managed by external service providers, to help improve the safety, quality, and efficiency of health care.

 However, the adoption of cloud technology has been variable across healthcare organizations, hampered by concerns that the technology might not align with existing methods of quality assurance and governance of privacy, data integrity, and service reliability.

 The compelling shared purpose and informational needs in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic have provided a powerful incentive to adopt and benefit from fast scale-up of cloud-based solutions. Now that implementers have established this momentum, it is important to be mindful of the compromises and risks associated with these solutions and their implementation at speed.

Healthcare Organizations

Individual provider organizations have drawn on cloud technologies to implement discrete COVID-19-related functionality for organizational and clinical processes including monitoring, diagnostics, testing, triage, and consultations. Some applications facilitate real-time monitoring of patients in high-risk settings for COVID-19 through generating overviews of data from several sources, some enable interactions between healthcare staff and patients at a distance, and others allow the development of operational management dashboards facilitating workforce, resource, and care planning.

A key benefit of cloud-based services to individual organizations and specialties is that they allow fast implementation and upscaling across a range of settings because they do not require the organization to purchase additional hardware (such as servers needed for on-premises solutions) and they can be implemented remotely (provided that appropriate infrastructure exists).

 

Health-care organizations should therefore consider prioritizing low-risk cloud solutions consisting of add-ons to existing functionality (eg, an application or a module on an existing cloud-based platform to allow rapid shared access), as these are more likely to enable better integration with existing practices than complex applications connecting departments and organizations.

 

Interorganisational data sharing

Interorganizational data sharing in health care is difficult, particularly when data are held in local servers as these might become data silos.

COVID-19 has introduced common and pressing informational needs surrounding incidence, high-risk patients, and testing activity. Health-care settings now increasingly use cloud technologies to share COVID-19-related information and provide intelligence through real-time integrated data analytics from various sources across organisations . New applications range from dashboards connecting cloud-based electronic health records to identify trends in high-risk patients and testing activity, to the establishment of data hubs facilitating near-real-time data aggregation and analysis to inform decisions around resources and clinical care associated with COVID-19 across hospital groupings. There are also many examples of COVID-19 portals that give overviews of national and international trends, hosted on cloud services, which are currently in development.

This degree of information sharing on a large scale is simply not possible with on-premises systems, where additional integration engines would need to be installed but would only allow relatively little information sharing between organizations through standardized messages. Cloud technologies seem to offer a way forward here. However, there is now a need to align the purposes of existing cloud technologies, as there is a risk of overlap between clouds from different service providers. There is also a risk of data silos in individual clouds, and associated issues surrounding data ownership and lock-in of data structures (eg, patient or location identifiers, disease classifications). Collaborative efforts aligning activities of cloud providers could reduce this risk, but this collaboration needs to be carefully balanced with information security considerations (which become exacerbated with larger scale as data transcends organizational boundaries). For instance, people have warned that establishing large clouds at speed might increase the risks of a so-called cyber pandemic, resulting in potential additional unanticipated risks and costs.

 The often fast-paced implementation of cloud applications for COVID-19 might also have compromised adequate negotiation around harmonizing data structures and governance at the outset, leading to potential issues surrounding data integration.

Therefore, there are clear benefits of cloud-based technologies compared with on-premises solutions, particularly in terms of agile implementation and scale-up of services where demand is unknown (such as with COVID-19), and cross-organizational data integration. Whether these benefits are sustained, however, remains to be seen.

 

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Nishant Kumar
Technology Enthusiast

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