The Cloud Is Revolutionizing Healthcare

(Image source)

(Image source)

The importance of cloud hosting in business is fairly easy to understand. An affordable and universally accessible data management platform can do wonders for a company’s efficiency. Applying cloud computing to the healthcare sector is proving to do more than reduce costs; it is saving lives.

Managed hosting providers are instrumental services on the business side of healthcare. The cloud, however, is becoming just as big a part in the practice of medicine. Cloud services allow doctors and specialists, who are halfway around the world, to monitor patients, prescribe medications, and offer support to local medical professionals.

While the broadest applications of this technology are for reducing doctor visits, by providing preventative care services remotely to patients, recent studies show telemedicine has a very notable effect on intensive care as well.

A study, released by the University of Massachusetts on December 5, showed that telemedicine applications improved the survival rate in remote intensive care units by up to 26 percent because intensive care specialists could monitor patients and advise healthcare professionals on the ground.

Between this and telesurgery, remote surgery conducted through a robot by a specialist, it’s easy to get lost in the futuristic sensation of it all, but the most important aspect of it is in the lower profile day-to-day work that telehealth revolutionizes.

Being able to monitor the vitals of high-risk patients remotely means freeing up hospital beds and allowing far more independence for patients, which saves many thousands of dollars in medical bills and reduces the overall per patient workload, all while improving the quality of care.

It allows skilled doctors to specialize more by giving them access to rare and geographically scattered patients so they can concentrate on a specific issue full time without forcing patients to travel. It also gives medical professionals, patients, and parents the ability to find, review, and share medical information instantly, eliminating redundant testing, many bureaucratic headaches, as well as the associated costs.