3 Cloud Services That Can Help CIOs Reach the Pillars of Healthcare

The need to comply with HIPAA guidelines and deliver better care to patients is driving healthcare CIOs to become technology pioneers in the medical field – especially when it comes to the adoption of cloud services.

By outsourcing their IT needs to cloud service providers, a healthcare system can focus on its core competencies – providing care for patients.

Darryl Shaw, director, healthcare solutions, new product development, Verizon said, “Healthcare and Life Sciences-enabled cloud has come a long way and our customers’ perceptions are changing – we’re seeing adoption accelerating with [customers] increasingly looking to the cloud as an option to give their organizations more agility in the industry.”

IT and the Three Pillars of Healthcare

One of the major benefits of cloud services is how they help healthcare organizations attain the three pillars of healthcare. Established by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), the three pillars of healthcare are a framework for improving the healthcare industry by increasing access to care, improving patient outcomes and lowering the cost of healthcare. The cloud helps providers address every one of those pillars by driving efficiencies in each process.

Here are three examples of how the cloud is empowering the delivery of healthcare:

Mobile health (mHealth): Mobility shifts the model of care delivery by using technology to bring healthcare to the point of need – whether to a sick retiree who can’t leave his or her apartment or to an entire underserved community. The foundation of most mobile applications is powered by the cloud, for example, Verizon’s Virtual Visits leverages the cloud to help patients receive care from a clinician through a secure app on their smartphone or tablet, or via a web portal.

Healthcare enabled services (Cloud): Better diagnostics and preventive medicine can lead to better outcomes and give healthcare firms a competitive advantage. In life science, pharmaceutical companies engage in clinical trials to create a blueprint that will allow them to develop medicines to address certain conditions. The University of Virginia’s Center for Diabetes Technology and the Stanford University School of Medicine leverages Verizon’s Healthcare-enabled cloud to allow researchers to securely track, access and store patient data from an artificial pancreas clinical trial.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Lowering the cost of care is done by reducing expenses or by shifting cost models using new, more efficient healthcare-delivery technologies. In the healthcare industry, cloud adoption, using an IaaS model, is making it easier for organizations to move to the cloud and a consumption oriented OPEX vs. CAPEX model avoiding direct investment in new servers and other networking technology.

To learn more about how Verizon is enabling the efficient and effective delivery of cloud-based healthcare services, visit the Verizon Enterprise Solutions Healthcare Industry website.