How cloud computing addresses healthcare’s data needs

The benefits of data residing in the cloud

IT departments within individual organizations can face real challenges when implementing the standards required to fulfill this vision for healthcare. Not only must cloud computing services in tightly regulated industries, such as healthcare, be able to store and transfer data in encrypted form securely, but they must also be able to process data in a legally compliant manner if they are to harness the benefits arising from digitalization. Building in this “security by design” demands a high level of expertise that many hospitals will struggle to achieve. 

A further challenge is that some healthcare regulations leave it up to the healthcare provider to work out if their implementation meets the requirements of the law. This creates the risk that a provider may be unintentionally non-compliant.

Holistic cloud security solutions, delivered by specialists, take some of this burden off healthcare IT staff, enabling team members to focus on supporting their organization’s core services. There are also wider advantages that such solutions deliver for the management of healthcare data. Cloud-based approaches prevent information silos from forming in individual organizations. Instead, these approaches promote information-sharing and make data available across a range of different interfaces. This is a feature that has benefits for individual patient data as well as for clinical research, where healthcare organizations can collaborate through a shared healthcare cloud computing platform.

Using a data- or software-as-a-service model means the development costs of the underlying capability are shared across multiple organizations. The services are designed to be highly scalable to meet provider’s changing needs. The approach helps to address the ongoing problem of IT staff shortages faced by healthcare providers. And, critically, it addresses concerns around the implementation and maintenance of high security standards by entrusting this to their cloud partner.

As a specialist in IT security, secunet offers products and services designed to protect digital transformation in healthcare. Its solutions implement the high security standards of Germany’s healthcare regulations, with features designed specifically to allow secure connection to government-run health services and complementary organizations. Its offerings are also based on open standards, which offers appropriate levels of transparency to regulators.

Waves of digital innovation

Whilst the benefits of digitalization are yet to be fully realized in healthcare, it is important not to lose sight of the even bigger prizes that digitalization could bring further down the line. Current compliance requirements mean that many IT systems are still operated on hospital sites, even when some data storage is distributed and virtualized. However, we are quickly moving toward a world in which local and central data is combined and used in innovative ways, with data linked together from different sources to meet a range of purposes.

New concepts are being tested. For example, “trusted cloud” infrastructure aims to securely tie together different spheres of activity such as medical networks and technologies, evaluation analysis, and robotics, to create platforms from which new applications can be developed.

“Federated machine learning” is another concept being explored. This allows algorithms to be trained on data that is held across multiple data sets, without the need for any data to be exchanged. This would greatly expand the potential for machine learning in the medical sector.

Clearly, digital innovation will arrive in more than one wave over the coming years.