Market trends and growth in the healthcare cloud computing market
Patients and their families demand more consumer-like experiences in healthcare to match how they bank, communicate, book travel, and order food. Healthcare organizations are also facing tighter budgets and need to maximize their investments. Because of this, healthcare has seen a rise in digital health and cloud-based products.
Hospitals, health systems, and clinics have been adopting these cloud-based products and services, embracing the cloud even faster than many expected.
According to Grandview research, the healthcare cloud computing market is expected to see continued progress at a compound annual growth rate of more than 16%.
In just the last five years, we’ve seen a transformation in how patients interact with clinicians and how healthcare employers interact with their staff. This includes better, easier-to-use tools and access to usable, high quality data from disparate sources. What makes this innovation unique is that many of these advancements have become digital or cloud-based.
Gartner1 found in a recent survey with healthcare provider CIOs that “A striking 45% of respondents indicated that new tools, technologies and applications they want to deploy are only available in the cloud, accelerating the migration to cloud-based solutions.”
This means, with a streamlined, and cloud capable integration environment, your organization can take full advantage of new innovations, strengthen data security, and contain costs.
It’s important to not only respond to interoperability demands that come with digital health, but also benefit from new and exciting technology innovation.
To determine your next steps to take advantage of the new frontier in healthcare, you’ll need cloud readiness assessments, strong partnerships, and a strategic plan.
Understand the top motivators for your cloud migration
Infrastructure cost savings and OpEx vs CapEx
When comparing legacy on-premise environments, migrating to the cloud can, in some cases, result in impressive cost savings. However, making capital expenditures (CapEx) on hardware and needing to predict infrastructure costs and growth years in advance is more complicated and risky than moving to an operating expenses (OpEx) model. In this model, you pay for what you need year after year, saving time, money, and resources.
Scalability
In addition to cost savings, scalability is a major advantage of deploying products and services in the cloud. Instead of your organization having to plan for the build-out of the production environment to match the theoretical maximum workloads, cloud hosting is elastic. The cloud hosting provider and related software can grow or shrink (to a point) to match the demand placed on it.
Resiliency
The resiliency and redundancy needed for an in-house data center means procuring everything in duplicate (or triplicate in the case of disaster recovery).You then spend even more time and money setting up those environments. These costs add up quickly, especially when you consider these assets will sit at the ready and not be used during normal operations.
Security
Security is paramount in healthcare and requires resources, expertise, and time to ensure adherence and certifications. With the right partner, your organization can focus on your core business and minimize data security risk. Your trusted partner can provide near-immediate security advancements and accelerate your adherence to global security frameworks and achievement of recognized security certifications.
IT staffing
Staffing for an on-premise environment can be burdensome. Your staff has to configure and maintain the actual interface engine, the servers, storage, security, and business continuity plans. It can become costly and difficult to keep up with the number of high priority tasks and growing integration requirements now required.
Supporting modernization initiatives
If future goals and initiatives are driving your technology modernization, such as AI, predictive analytics, or total experience, it’s important to understand individual integration requirements as they relate to real-time availability, latency, data sources, and data quality.
The increasing value of cloud migration
Cloud services reliability has matured, and many healthcare organizations have experienced increased efficiencies, reduced costs, and greater reliability across their systems. Streamlining through cloud integration has increased their organization’s productivity, supported high performing data fabric architectures, and helped increase effectiveness of programs and overall care outcomes.
Migration to modern cloud infrastructure empowers healthcare organizations to adopt state-of-the-art technologies that can open the door to new growth opportunities. Cloud infrastructure today can deliver the speed and reliability that healthcare consumers require. Now is the time to have these important conversations in your organization, especially when planning future initiatives.
Invest in your cloud migration strategy
The cloud market has been growing exponentially. The projected growth of this market shows this trend will only continue, including within the healthcare sector.
It’s vital to think about how your organization should migrate to the cloud to yield all the benefits noted above. Having a solid cloud migration and interoperability or integration strategy is the first step.
Interested in making the move to the cloud but not sure where to start? Rhapsody can help.
Whether you’re ready to transition entirely to the cloud or want to develop a hybrid strategy (we’ll talk more about this in the future), Rhapsody will work with you to individualize and customize the best approach for your cloud migration plans.
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