So far the benefits of the cloud as a concept have touched individuals in only a very limited way. Most of the revolution is happening within the confines of businesses with consumers only reaping the indirect rewards due to increased efficiency and lower costs. Medical care however is one area that is ripe for cloud-based disruption and it will touch the average person in a very real manner. There are two ways by which this can happen – consolidation of medical records in the cloud, and big data.
Currently, most medical data is locked up in “silos” within individual hospitals or with doctors. Even though the move to digitize medical records is underway, there is still a long way to go. The ultimate goal is to have every patient’s record easily accessible from anywhere using any device by any authorized person including the patient themselves. But for this to happen, there has to be an industrywide collaboration and a standardized format in which this data is to be stored along with a publicly agreed-upon shared database whose cost has to be spread out either amongst the customers or amongst the healthcare institutions themselves. Unfortunately creating such a consensus is extremely difficult. The corporate world is not exactly known for building bridges and coming together.
But without such cooperation, even digitization of medical records is useless. Each healthcare organization will have its own protocols and its own data format. This is before taking into account all of the regulatory procedures for storing medical data in order to maintain the privacy of the individual.
But easy access to an individual patient’s records is just one aspect of how the cloud can be used to revolutionize healthcare. Few fields are as data intensive and computing tools can take advantage of “big data” in order to make healthcare recommendations that were simply unavailable to doctors before. The amount of information that is out there with regards to patient health is staggering. Just imagine the useful statistical analysis that can be carried out if all of it can be collated into a single organized structure.
Currently there are many diseases and conditions whose treatment is uncertain and doctors are only able to give very general advice. With the power of big data however, they can come up with personalized recommendations with statistics and probabilities that can dramatically improve the quality of overall health care. But as mentioned before, all of this is based on the premise of a shared medical database countrywide – and if you’re ambitious, perhaps worldwide as well.
It seems to me sometimes that the only real world example of cloud-based collaboration between various entities is e-mail. Here we have a standard that is accepted by everyone and cuts across individual service providers – using a Gmail address you can talk to someone with a Yahoo e-mail and vice versa. All other cloud solutions are usually locked away from each other with no data sharing and no standardized way for them to interact. If medical care is to truly benefit from the cloud revolution, this kind of collaboration simply has to happen. It’s too big an opportunity to pass up and the benefits can be enormous.
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