Cloud computing – The Key to Innovative Healthcare Data Management for Enhanced Patient Care

The healthcare sector generates an exponential amount of data every second. 30% of the world’s data volume is estimated to be generated by the healthcare industry alone, and is expected to reach 36% by 2025, which is 6% faster than manufacturing, 10% faster than financial services, and 11% faster than media and entertainment.

However, the industry faces several challenges in extracting value from that data and gaining valuable insights that would help patient outcomes, value-based care, telehealth, telemedicine, interoperability, and other operational efficiencies.

Role of data management in healthcare

Patients generate an enormous amount of data, including vital signs recorded in real-time and electronic health records, which must be stored, structured, and analyzed to provide holistic care. Additionally, the healthcare sector is subject to strict regulations requiring it to maintain the highest levels of PHI security & governance. With all these nuances, one cannot forget that 80% of enterprise data is unstructured. Structuring this data, optimizing it, and extracting ultimate insights in a governed and secured manner is a mammoth task! 

Why is the healthcare sector finding it difficult to manage its data?

  • Data interoperability: In healthcare, data interoperability refers to consolidating patient information from various electronic healthcare systems. This allows patients to determine what records can be shared while facilitating research and innovation. Data interoperability remains a persistent challenge in the healthcare industry, not only because of technical issues, such as data consistency between different systems and organizations but also because of an integrated structure of processes and a willingness to share information among parties.
  • Data Security and Regulations: To build an efficient healthcare ecosystem, it is essential to maintain patient trust in privacy and security regulations. Since patient privacy depends on HIPAA2 compliance and the secure adoption of electronic health records, data security has become increasingly important to the healthcare industry. As regulations continue to change, keeping data sets and engagements compliant can be challenging. As a result of poor data quality and strategy, organizations have trouble meeting new regulatory requirements and incur high audit and reporting costs.
  • Sprawl of unstructured data: A healthcare organization can have over 80% unstructured data, so it’s crucial to be aware of what exists and avoid accidentally sharing sensitive information. A physician’s notes in an EHR, an email, a text file, a photo, or a video, are all examples of this type of information. Individuals sometimes share personal information, such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and personal health information, when communicating with companies (as customers) or within companies (as employees). In many cases, they may not realize the significance of this, may not remember doing it, or may not understand that this data is now part of the company’s unstructured data. Undoubtedly, this information is highly sensitive, and companies do not want it to fall into the wrong hands. Organizations can safely move their data to the cloud, where it will be secure to prevent anything like this. 

The key to efficient and effective healthcare data management lies with Microsoft Azure. By migrating their data to the cloud, organizations can secure their data while maintaining regulatory compliance laws and be cost-effective, as storing data on a public cloud like Azure is cheaper than keeping servers on-premise. 

Microsoft Azure for Healthcare

The healthcare industry has seen an accelerated transformation ever since the outbreak of the pandemic. Keen observers in the industry are a catalyst by recommending ideas to improve the system, such as care access, critical care, the safety of the patients and caregivers, and more. Microsoft Azure is working with healthcare customers along with partners like Data Dynamics, to set a course for recovery and resilience in an ever-changing environment. Some of the ways in which Microsoft Azure is accelerating healthcare transformation are as follows:

  • Help protect health information – Azure helps ensure the protection of sensitive data, to enhance the security and privacy of the customers. It also helps in managing evolving compliance regulations while improving data governance.
  •  Improve clinical and operational insights – Azure integrates the data across various systems to provide one single source of truth that is leveraged to extract insights for predicting risks and improving patient care, quality assurance, and operational efficiencies. 
  • Enhance patient and provider engagement – Microsoft Azure ensures the secure flow of data through all data points, virtual and in-person, that helps elevate the patient’s experience, easy diagnostics, and improve health conditions.
  • Accelerate research and development innovation – Azure helps in driving faster advancements by modernizing discovery, development, and quality system process to support rapid modeling, improve clinical trial management, and accelerate innovation.
  • Enhance collaboration – Azure accelerates the adoption of digital technologies that drive collaboration among healthcare team members for secured coordination and simplified workflow management. 

Microsoft’s Azure File Migration Program has made data migration easier by sponsoring the usage of Data Dynamics’ StorageX, which has made cloud adoption much easier and cost-effective. The Azure File Migration Program allows companies to migrate applications and workloads with large numbers of files, unstructured data, and object storage data into Azure for FREE. Click here to know more. Or contact us at solutions@datdyn.com I (713)-491-4298.

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