Healthcare organizations across the country share common goals: to provide better patient care and retain their valuable workforces. To meet this mission, they’ll need to transform their infrastructure and processes to improve data access, collaboration and operational support while building for the future.
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need to rapidly scale services in the dynamic healthcare environment. To support organizational agility, such as the ability to spin up or down on-demand resources, many organizations have turned to the cloud. Healthcare IT leaders value the cloud’s flexibility, scalable resources and pay-as-you-go models.
But cloud migration is not without its challenges: managing the shift from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure model, the complexities of migrating legacy applications and the need to upskill workers in support of a cloud environment. There’s a common misconception that moving to the cloud will result in a loss of control over data and introduce security risks. Organizations may also think that cloud services will be prohibitively expensive, or, conversely, that they will always be cheaper than on-premises solutions.
Health systems don’t need to face these hurdles alone. Though a cloud migration can involve many moving parts, it doesn’t have to be unwieldy, and healthcare IT leaders can quell concerns by looking at the experiences of their industry peers.
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The Benefits of Cloud Beyond Cost Savings
Optimized cloud environments often save money, but healthcare organizations may find other benefits that they didn’t initially account for. In addition to scalability and flexibility, enhanced data accessibility, improved disaster recovery and access to new capabilities such as artificial intelligence are some of the equally impactful (though less understood) benefits.
Data is often locked in monolithic applications, but when organizations move those apps and corresponding data sets to the cloud, new insights can be gleaned from that data. Health systems will find that they can access and leverage that data in new and possibly unexpected ways. Breaking data silos down allows for innovation, such as applying AI to the systems and processes that have moved to the cloud.
A cloud migration can only boost an organization’s disaster recovery program. The cloud allows hospitals to move their systems and data around multiple geographies, so there’s typically a higher availability and reliability.
After overcoming initial skepticism about cloud security, healthcare organizations now generally agree that their data is safer in a cloud environment. They understand that their partners have made massive cybersecurity investments in their solutions.
Advanced security measures such as encryption, multifactor authentication and continuous monitoring have significantly shifted opinions in favor of the cloud. There are newer security measures that have been introduced in the past few years that protect data at rest and in transit. Data can be encrypted as it moves between the cloud or to the client.
Evaluating a Healthcare Cloud Migration
A year or two after a migration, healthcare IT leaders should ask themselves if their journey is truly complete or if there are still steps to take. Some apps are challenging to move, so perhaps only the easier apps have been moved, leaving the more challenging ones for later.
IT leaders who have completed a migration have stepped into optimization mode and are looking to contain costs. Now that they’ve had some time with the new system and can feather their resources appropriately, they can add automation, which creates more predictable results. They will be doing continuous process improvement.
Organizations also have better cloud management platforms and analytics tools to improve their financial visibility. These offer real-time data on cloud expenditures, allowing them to make informed decisions and optimize their cloud investments.
Now is the best time to have transparency and visibility into cloud costs. How will organizations act with such knowledge? Will it affect change? Will it drive behaviors to optimize spending? Analytics tools are having a great impact on driving cloud optimization and subsequent costs as well.
DIVE DEEPER: A new cloud computing research report from CDW sheds light on migration trends.
Finding the Right Partner for a Healthcare Cloud Migration
Healthcare as a critical sector requires industry-specific experience. Organizations need a partner that understands which applications can operate in a cloud environment, what may need special attention in a cloud migration discussion, and how to improve the user experience for clinicians and patients.
A trusted technology partner with deep healthcare familiarity and cloud technology expertise can provide essential support to organizations in managing their cloud environments. Such partnerships ensure that healthcare’s unique needs and challenges are effectively addressed.
This article is part of HealthTech’s MonITor blog series.
