MEDICAL INDUSTRY EMBRACES CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing plays a significant role in IT world especially in the medical industry.

The medical field has embraced the cloud computing in many different ways – from storing patient information to new drug discoveries, innovative medical treatments, storing, distributing and analyzing of medical imaging and real-time data. If we count in everyday operations management of medical facilities and employees, then cloud computing in the medical industry grow even further.

• Basic Record Keeping

In general, hospitals and other medical institutions create large amounts of data on each individual patient. It includes patient histories, procedures, medications, x-rays, charts and billings.

Before medical institutions started using cloud computing all this data was stored on-site in each facility. This put some restrictions on them exchanging information. For those facilities that have made a shift to cloud computing, this information is easily accessible and it can be easily distributed between various medical facilities and medical professionals worldwide.

For large medical facilities and the big data that is related to them cloud hosting permits superior interconnectedness and data distribution.  The cloud computing is extremely beneficial to the specialist to people updating charts upon receiving the results from labs across distance. This remote capability and real time data exchange is revolutionizing record keeping in the industry.

•  Innovative and Life Saving Treatments for Less Money in Less Time

Cloud computing is having greater impact in treatment than just a data storage or transferable.

Due to the nature of the cloud, companies are actually able to rent substantial computer resources on an hourly basis at a favorable cost. This ability to analyze enormous amounts of data is affecting many industries as well as health care.

At Seattle Children’s Hospital in Seattle, WA, craniofacial specialists have used the cloud to treat adolescent patients who suffer from prematurely fused skulls.

According to Dr. Michael Cunningham, Medical Director of the hospital’s Craniofacial Center, “The biggest obvious consequence of having craniosynostosis is that your head shape gets very abnormal and it increases the pressure inside the skull, having potential to damage the brain.”

When studying about the disease has been furthered, researchers have came up with conclusion that craniosynostosis may be caused by a genetic irregularity in bone cells and how they interact with other bone cells. For Dr. Cunningham this information was not enough.

The research required voluminous amount of information that was stored in cloud. It helped doctors to identify those patients with similarities in the composition and make-up if cells. Researchers were able to quickly collect, crunch, analyze and sequence the information in a shred of time. Without a cloud solution it would have taken much longer.

“It’s the first thing that’s ever been found that really gives us a clue as to where to look in terms of the underlying cause,” Cunningham says.

Cloud computing can be used in diagnostics to get good effect.  The companies are putting vast amounts of cancer tissue data into the cloud in order to expedite diagnosis, something that is obviously of great import in this facet of medicine.

As doctors submit new or unknown cancerous tissue samples to these companies who is storing sample data into their cloud databases. High-probability diagnoses are returned within less time such as a one day.

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