Four Ways Google Cloud Supports Healthcare IT

Cloud computing has a lot to offer healthcare organizations, including the ability to better leverage data with patient care, flexibility, and scalability. The healthcare industry is at the very beginning of cloud adoption.

Concerns about HIPAA compliance and cloud-legacy system integration are among the major obstacles that have kept healthcare IT on premises. However, today’s marketplace offers a large selection of compliant, healthcare-specific cloud applications that address the old concerns. Google Cloud, a Burwood partner, is an innovator in many of these areas.

Four ways Google Cloud supports healthcare IT

Healthcare solutions from Google Cloud, are HIPAA-compliant and provide applications and infrastructure for everything from connected care to Big Data analytics. Following are a few use cases:

1. Image storage for clinical decision-making: Generating upwards of 300 million images annually, advanced medical imaging is a natural fit for affordable cloud storage. Google Cloud has partnered with several healthcare IT vendors to integrate the image generation, storage, and analysis to support clinical decision-making.

2. EHR data mining and data interoperability for targeted patient care. Google Cloud enables healthcare data scientists to mine EHRs more quickly and easily than ever. Also important, you can integrate data from patient wearables, paving the way for targeted, personalized healthcare services.

3. Big, Big Data and high-powered analytics for medical research. Google Cloud's analytics tools can tackle even the largest data pools—like the human genome. With Genomics, some genetics scientists have found they can analyze the human genome 400 percent more quickly with Google Cloud than with any on premise tools.

4. HIPAA-compliant tools for caregiver collaboration. Google’s G Suite connects researchers, caregivers, and patients alike—whether they’re just down the hall or across the country. Because it is HIPAA-compliant, G Suite for healthcare enables caregivers to share patient data, collaborate on diagnoses and even conduct secure telemedicine sessions via Hangouts Meet.

Time to go all-in for the cloud?

For many healthcare organizations these days, the question isn’t “whether,” but “how” to migrate more data and applications to the cloud. The healthcare industry is rapidly changing shape, and the cloud can free your IT team to stay laser-focused on the goals of your organization. One of the great advantages of cloud services is that you can scale or change direction quickly—and, these days, that kind of agility provides a serious competitive advantage in healthcare.