Revolutionizing Healthcare With the Cloud: AWS and Emerging Trends in HealthTech
Jun 13, 2023
Healthcare, like many industries, is evolving rapidly as a result of technological advancement. Healthtech, in particular, is experiencing tremendous growth, thanks to the cloud computing capabilities available today through platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS). The cloud opens up many doors for healthcare systems, biotech companies, medical startups, and others to address complex problems at scale and deliver better care to patients.
What’s more, the healthcare cloud computing market is going to continue growing at a rapid clip. According to research from MarketsandMarkets, cloud computing in healthcare will reach almost $90B by 2027 after hitting nearly $40B in 2022. Much of this growth is driven by the increased adoption of mobile health, telehealth, wearables, IoT, and big data analytics. Looking ahead, things will get even more exciting.
In this blog post, we discuss what’s coming down the pipeline in the healthcare and healthtech industries and what role the cloud will play in their developments. We also share how ClearScale has helped healthcare IT leaders achieve their most ambitious goals on AWS.
What’s on the Horizon in the Healthcare and Healthtech Industries?
One of the areas in which the cloud will shine in healthcare over the next 5-10 years is in how it will promote preventative health through AI/ML-powered analytics. The cloud not only provides the infrastructure needed to support advanced AI/ML models – it also makes it easier for developers to build, train, deploy, and maintain these models over time. Consequently, studying population health and delivering personalized medicine will require much less effort.
Healthcare companies and healthtech developers will be able to provide better products and services that are tailored to the unique needs of individual patients. Healthcare researchers will be able to study health outcomes within certain geographies or demographics in much greater detail. Groups that spend a lot of time thinking about the future – epidemiologists, biostatisticians, etc. – will be able to make better predictions about the future.
The cloud also makes life better for physicians and health systems overwhelmed with administration tasks or regulatory obligations. For example, cloud solutions like Amazon Transcribe Medical can now automatically transform medical speech into text, which can then be stored in the cloud for further processing. In general, more organizations are comfortable with storing sensitive PHI, like medical images, on remote cloud servers, thanks to the cybersecurity sophistication inherent in today’s leading cloud platforms.
Additionally, some healthcare organizations are trusting cloud-based applications more and more with things like medical imaging and diagnoses. Mass General Brigham in Boston already has physicians using approximately 50 algorithms to support patient care. Going forward, we’ll see even more programs like this, based in the cloud, that can detect things like tumors and cancers with incredible accuracy.
HealthTech and IoT
Another area that will evolve immensely in the coming years is the wearables / medical IoT niche. In fact, the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) market will hit nearly $190B by 2028, as healthcare groups push to release smart medical devices to patients all over the world. Healthtech companies will continue leveraging the cloud to implement robust remote patient monitoring tools, telehealth, at-home care, and more. Plus, these businesses will improve how they share data back with patients, allowing people to take better control over their health.
Beyond these use cases, the cloud will keep doing what it does well already – automating workflows, accelerating innovation, decreasing infrastructure burden, and scaling with demand. Healthcare organizations have all the tools they need to serve more patients better than ever before.
How ClearScale Supports Healthcare Organizations
As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, we’ve worked with organizations across many industries, including the healthcare and HealthTech sectors. We earned the AWS Healthcare Competency back in 2018 and have continued to work on exciting and innovative cloud projects in the space, many of which were crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For instance, we worked with a medical consulting firm that helps healthcare offices optimize day-to-day operations. The client wanted to build a solution that would enable physicians to conduct remote appointments. We used tools like Amazon Connect and Amazon AppStream 2.0 to bundle key medical functions together within a single, HIPAA-compliant application. This application is now available to patients through their personal devices, and our client’s customers have a secure remote/virtual appointment service.
We also partnered with a health-at-home solutions company that needed to automate its medical document transcription and masking process. The company was processing thousands of documents manually, which took an enormous amount of time. Our engineers used AWS Step Functions, an automated pipeline orchestrator, and multiple machine learning services to streamline the document processing workflow. As a result of the project, our client achieved an estimated 3x improvement in processing efficiency without compromising anything on the PHI/PII front.
Furthermore, we’ve helped healthcare organizations migrate to AWS when they need to boost performance. For example, we helped a medical devices company move critical infrastructure to AWS so that it could expand the accessibility of its liver health monitoring service. Our engineers developed the migration plan, implemented AWS DevOps tools, and set the client up to deploy new offerings efficiently in the future.
HealthTech in the Cloud Next Steps
These examples showcase our ability to complete a wide variety of cloud projects for healthcare companies today. We understand how to leverage the latest cloud technologies to solve challenging problems in healthcare within the confines of today’s regulatory standards. Whether you want to upgrade your population health analytics, launch a new service, deliver personalized medicine, or fulfill a different type of use case altogether, we can help.
Get in touch today to speak with a cloud expert and discuss how we can help:
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