Healthcare service providers in the Asia-Pacific region are planning to turn to cloud computing to improve patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes, a new survey has found.
According to IDC Health Insights, 69 per cent of IT decision makers across the region indicated that they have allocated budgets to cloud computing. None of the respondents intend to reduce cloud spending, while more than half plan to spend more within the next three years.
Lower implementation costs and flexible pay-per-use pricing models may have been the main draw of cloud computing to most organisations, but the healthcare industry is looking beyond these short-term benefits.
“The healthcare industry is waking up to the benefits of cloud architectures in solving their human resource issues, and helping them in their strategic business goals of improving patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes and providing collaborative healthcare,” said Sash Mukherjee, senior market analyst for IDC Health Insights Asia/Pacific.
Key cloud services the healthcare industry would adopt include server and storage capacity on-demand, IDC said. This reflects the huge volume of structured and unstructured data generated in patient care. Respondents are also more likely to shift applications such as electronic health records and telemedicine, rather than image archiving, to the cloud.
Not surprisingly, the overriding concerns surrounding the cloud are security and connectivity.
To succeed in the healthcare market, IDC said, cloud providers would have to dispel the misconceptions and confusions in the minds of end users especially around security, and the relative advantages of private, public and hybrid clouds.
Photo credit: James Cridland, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
