Healthcare organizations (HCOs), once cloud laggards, are embracing public and private cloud services to address a wide range of business problems. A recent survey revealed that 76 percent of HCOs anticipate using public cloud services within the year, putting public cloud vendors on pace to be the most popular cloud services providers in healthcare. Why? HCOs are turning to cloud vendors to address a wide range of business problems, but the three most prominent, highlighted below, are changing the game in healthcare.

  • Cybersecurity is the leading cloud adoption driver. According to recent research, 27 percent of HCO employees are aware of a ransomware attack that impacted their organization within the last year. Unlike data breaches, ransomware attacks can bring operations to a standstill as providers return to paper charting. In response, healthcare organizations are turning to cloud providers for always-on backup and disaster recovery solutions that help mitigate this risk.
  • Advanced analytics is amplifying data-center capabilities. High-performance compute and AI frameworks are helping HCOs extract insight from data that is currently locked away in unstructured data silos. Cloud data centers can leverage pretrained models to analyze unstructured data and AI frameworks to develop custom predictive tools that forecast clinical events and push alerts back to providers within existing workflows, amplifying the clinical value of their electronic health records. This is having a direct impact on patient care.
  • Pretrained AI is improving the consumer experience. Cloud vendors are attracting healthcare providers and insurers with pretrained healthcare chatbots and HIPAA-compliant voice assistants that can be deployed to engage consumers across all stages of the patient journey. Health insurers are using voice assistants to answer member-benefits questions, reducing call-center volume in the process. Providers are leveraging pretrained healthcare chatbots to amplify post-acute care management, leading to lower readmission rates and increased patient satisfaction.

Now is the time to plot your migration to the cloud. Chose a single partner to address your most pressing business needs or mix and match vendors to create a multicloud strategy that will support your long-term digital transformation. Forrester’s freshly published “Now Tech: Enterprise Health Clouds, Q2 2019” will outline the most compelling cloud vendors actively working to transform healthcare today and the business problems they are positioned to solve.