The pace of innovation shows no signs of slowing down. Has your team figured out how to prioritize?
The question is no longer “why cloud”, but rather “what goes to cloud”. This decision determines how your organization stays on the leading edge of patient care and critical IT decision making.
What’s in a decision?
Not every application is a fit for cloud, and not every clinical workflow will support the impact of cloud-based solutions. Understanding the nuances of security, connectivity, and application scalability in a chosen cloud provider is a requirement to ensure your long-term cloud strategy will be sustainable for your purpose-driven needs. Ask yourself:
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Has your organization reviewed its list of IT initiatives recently and determined where a hybrid-cloud or full-cloud native implementation might enhance outcomes related to patient success or clinical adoption?
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Does your organization have a methodology for evaluating, scoring, and prioritizing technology initiatives to determine which are purpose-built on cloud vs. on-premises?
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Do you have the time & skillset required to modernize in the cloud & support the solution long-term, including any required end-user education?
The above questions can be daunting. How do you know when cloud computing is a fit? Just a few things worth considering from the technical side might be:
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How tightly coupled are the clinical processes and data estates between your target system and other critical line-of-business apps?
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Does your team have a full understanding of the various internal and third-party integration points?
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Is the application web-friendly, or consumed via a browser?
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Can the return on investment of moving to the cloud, either in raw dollars or productivity/outcomes, be quantified?
Landscape of Differentiation
The pace of innovation happening in and around leading cloud services provides faster technology adoption for healthcare organizations. The business ecosystem sees a trend where new technology emerges first in the cloud, gains market traction, then becomes more widely available and accessible from a feature-adoption perspective.
It is not a question of whether your business gets into the cloud. Evaluation of which assets move to cloud, and how to enable cloud interoperability across applications and services, is the differentiator that enables patient care. Not every hospital or service provider can guarantee the same level of security or operational efficiency – cloud helps close the gap from the top 1% of hospitals to the remaining 99% of providers.
Leveraging cloud is more than just scaling up, scaling out, and having an accurate inventory of what is in-use by an organization. Thinking that cloud will solve all your cost problems is a misnomer, as well. Organizations that establish cloud-native infrastructure and associated agile processes gain better data insights but also must invest in skilling up their workforce. As the capability to provide easier integration with third-party applications and real-time data grows, the demand for these capabilities becomes the measure of success as a lagging indicator to improved patient outcomes.
Building out a robust methodology to understand your technical landscape is a start but doesn’t necessarily consider the commercial or clinical decisions in moving to the cloud. There are numerous contractual, operational and end-user factors to consider. Working with a trusted partner is key. Eastwall has worked with dozens of leading healthcare organizations to prioritize application initiatives and product portfolios to determine the right fit for applications in the cloud. We help design, build, and operate innovative cloud solutions on the Azure platform. Please contact us for a free consultation on how various Azure cloud services can help transform your business. Eastwall has a proven Commercial Optimization and Cloud Architecture methodology that can help your business prioritize the next cloud move.