From the January/February 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Through the cloud, clinicians and developers alike can unearth data and put it back together like a puzzle. Currently, clinicians spend significant time sifting through cases for comparisons. In the future, cloud-based apps will use computational power to access thousands, if not millions, of other cases to compare any one case at a certain time. Leveraging the cloud, clinicians will be able to focus on more intellectual, decision-making and communication activities.
These apps will compound algorithms on top of other algorithms, datasets with more datasets — all to help enable better outcomes for hospitals, clinicians and patients. App developers, like the academic institutions that already develop helpful algorithms each year, will be able to host their patient offerings on the cloud and access them from any place, any time.
Innovation in the cloud also opens up opportunities to decrease clinical miscommunications. Take, for example, patient handoffs. With the cloud and app solutions, a patient’s multi-disciplinary team can be quickly coordinated — through image sharing and contextualized collaboration — over time and location. A doctor working the night shift will be able to provide analysis and notes during a quick, 10-minute break. Then, a cancer care nurse can review those insights and notes the next morning. This will all be as simple as using social media.
Apps will help clinicians and patients get more value out of the images they have. One study shows that 85 percent of patients want access to their radiology images.6 Many clinicians know that a 3-D image is worth more than a thousand words when trying to help a patient understand his or her condition. Through the cloud and its apps, clinicians will be able to easily and quickly access those large, 3-D images while sitting alongside a patient explaining a tumor or other diagnoses. This highlights the amazing potential of the health care cloud — to change processes, workflows and care pathways, all to the ultimate benefit of patients.
As the health care industry faces a substantial flurry of data and environmental demands, providers need the cloud and its innovations to solve the problems of today and tomorrow. This work has already begun.
Rasu Shrestha, M.D., M.B.A., is the chief innovation officer for UPMC.
Evren Eryurek is the software chief technology officer at GE Healthcare.
Endnotes:
1. http://martinhilbert.net/WorldInfoCapacity.html
2. CIO magazine. May 2013
3. “Types and Origins of Diagnostic Errors in Primary Care Settings,” Journal of American Medicine, 2013
4. Radiologists’ Burden of Inefficiency Using Conventional Imaging Workstations
5. http://www.westhealth.org/sites/default/files/The-Value-of-Medical-Device-Interoperability.pdf
6. CDW Analytics in Healthcare 2015 — 150Healthcare decision makersBack to HCB News
