Cloud computing in healthcare has revolutionized data security, enhanced collaboration, and improved patient care. We talk about its benefits, challenges and offer some best practices for cloud adoption in healthcare.
The COVID-19 pandemic propelled healthcare digital transformation into a new decade overnight, with providers and organizations quickly embracing artificial intelligence (AI) diagnostic tools, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, wearable devices, and cloud migration. Now, a lot of healthcare organizations are clearly on the path to fully adopting these innovative technologies. These advancements improved collaboration, accessibility, cost-efficiency, and patient outcomes — but they come with significant challenges.
The sheer volume of data, mixed with the need for interconnectivity, interoperability and stringent security standards, make digitizing healthcare both a powerful tool for change and a complex logistical issue.
Concerns around user privacy, the potential for cyberattacks, and ethics further complicate implementation and adoption. Cloud computing in healthcare has become a solution for storing data efficiently, enhancing collaboration, and securing sensitive information from unauthorized access.
Understanding Cloud Computing in Healthcare
So, what is cloud computing in healthcare? Traditionally, healthcare organizations hosted massive on-premise data warehouses to store patient data. Businesses made huge financial investments in hardware and equipment to protect, cool, and access necessary patient data. With cloud computing and hosting IT resources over the internet, businesses enjoy benefits like greater flexibility, increased scalability, cheaper upfront IT investments, improved collaboration, easier data sharing, improved reliability, less stress on staff, and a much better disaster recovery or business continuity position.
Cloud computing is revolutionizing the healthcare security industry, protecting 2.3 zettabytes of global health data, including lab results, medical imaging, patient information, billing details, medical histories, and genetic data. Modern healthcare organizations also have multiple options regarding cloud adoption, such as public clouds, private clouds, and a hybrid model.
About 94 percent of organizations are moving to the cloud, but why make the major migration? Let’s dive into the specific benefits.
Benefits of Cloud Computing for Healthcare Data Security
With 48 percent of businesses now storing their most important data in the cloud, benefits like scalability, enhanced data protection, data management, cost-efficiency, and regulatory compliance show the real-world impacts of migrating systems to the cloud.
Advanced Data Protection and Encryption
Personal medical data is 10X more valuable on the black market than financial information, so it needs the highest level of data encryption. For example, AES-256, TLS/SSL, and envelope encryption are the gold standard of encryption for both data in transit and at rest. Cloud computing easily uses these methods to offer the highest levels of security for sensitive healthcare data, though it’s important to remember, organizations should not assume security is default. It requires set up and regular monitoring.
Improved Management of Large-Volume Datasets
Healthcare is a data-driven business, and the average hospital produces twice the amount of data housed in the Library of Congress annually. A staggering 137 terabytes a day are uploaded, transmitted, accessed and edited, which is almost impossible to manage efficiently in traditional on-premise data warehouses. Cloud technology in healthcare improves processing demands without needing costly investments in larger warehouses, cooling systems, and hardware.
Increased Cost-Effectiveness and Operational Efficiency
Cloud solutions are often cheaper than on-premise infrastructure, eliminating the need for large upfront investments, 24/7 security, and in-house dedicated IT staff. Cloud computing infrastructure costs are on the provider, and healthcare businesses can easily scale usage up and down.
Enhanced Regulatory Compliance
HIPAA fines range anywhere from $100-$50,000 per violation, creating severe financial penalties, reputational damage, productivity losses, and even lengthy lawsuits. Cloud adoption enhances regulatory compliance by automating detailed logs and activity trails, improving security configurations, encrypting protected health information (PHI), and advanced identity and access management (IAM) solutions.
Increased AI Adoption
From robots performing surgeries to personalized treatment plans based on millions of patient health records, AI adoption in healthcare is growing rapidly but needs the strong underlying processing power and scalability of cloud computing. As AI uses and analyzes all this data for better patient outcomes, more personal healthcare, and better communication between providers, it needs the highest standard of security encryption, user access controls, and continuous network monitoring.
The attractive benefits of cloud computing make it an increasingly popular solution for healthcare organizations, but it’s important to consider best practices as well.
Best Practices for Adopting Cloud Computing in Healthcare
Starting with thorough cloud security strategy to establish a secure foundation for rigorous access controls across a large healthcare workforce, let’s take a look at some of the best practices for adopting cloud computing.
1. Establish a Reliable Cloud Strategy
Technical debt in healthcare organizations can significantly impact the quality, speed, and convenience of care delivery. Outdated systems and technologies can cause inefficiencies that result in higher costs, safety concerns, and security breaches.
Maintaining a reliable IT strategy that accounts for system end-of-life occurrences and data security best practices helps healthcare organizations protect themselves from increased security risks and poor employee experience.
To manage technical debt, healthcare organizations should adopt strategies such as establishing a reliable cloud strategy that accounts for regular maintenance, timely updates, and using the full capabilities of their technology investments. This approach helps ensure that IT infrastructure remains modern and capable of supporting emerging technologies, ultimately improving patient care and operational efficiency.
2. Conduct Thorough Security and Risk Assessments
Identify, evaluate and prioritize existing security infrastructure with an initial risk assessment. This foundational starting piece evaluates your third-party vendors, assesses compliance, and identifies weak points in the cloud or on-premise infrastructure.
3. Implement Strong Access Controls and Authentication Measures
Every hospital employs 982 people on average, including physicians, surgeons, nurses, technicians, cleaners, and other staff for fully holistic care. Strong access controls and authentication measures in a large workforce are necessary to maintain data integrity and privacy, using tools like multifactor authentication, session timeouts, and detailed audit logs.
4. Establish a Strong Data Security Strategy
Healthcare data security aims to protect the data, computers and networks that healthcare providers and other organizations use. This involves incorporating cybersecurity measures to promote data confidentiality, integrity and accessibility.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) updated its cybersecurity guidance to help healthcare organizations comply with the HIPAA Security Rule, which focuses on protecting ePHI. Effective data security practices include end-to-end encryption, the use of virtual private networks (VPNs), and the implementation of two-factor authentication for accessing patient records.
The gold standard of data encryption protects data in active transit, and cloud computing helps protect data as it travels over the internet to provider devices. For example, as a physician accesses lab results on a mobile tablet, data is only encrypted once it reaches the authorized device, making it unreadable during transmission.
5. Perform Regular Security Audits and Updates
Cybersecurity is not one-and-done, so healthcare organizations should practice quarterly security audits, ethical hacking for simulations, and penetration testing to ensure ongoing compliance.
Now that IT and leadership teams leading the transition are aware of best practices, let’s discuss how cloud computing addresses healthcare data security challenges.
Address Critical Healthcare Data Security Challenges with Cloud Computing
About 75 percent of patients are concerned about the privacy of their personal health data, so it’s mission-critical that consumers feel comfortable using tools like remote wearables, online portals, and office chatbots.
Protect Patient Information From Cyber Threats
In 2023, more than 133 million records were exposed in healthcare data breaches. Cloud computing enhances data protection, encryption standards, secure sharing, and stringent access controls to thoroughly protect patient information from cybercriminals.
Ensure Data Availability and Disaster Recovery
In case of a tornado, hurricane, flood, or power outage, it’s extremely detrimental for healthcare data systems to go offline, blocking important actions like refilling medications and monitoring chronic issues. Cloud infrastructure improves business continuity and continued access to crucial data even in the event of natural disasters, power outages, or cyber breaches.
Manage Secure Data Sharing Among Healthcare Providers
One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is secure data sharing among health providers. When providers can securely communicate, share imaging, and relay patient care plans, patients experience improved outcomes, more holistic care, and better quality of life.
Maintain Data Integrity Across Multiple Healthcare Systems
Traditionally, healthcare systems were extremely siloed, and managing patient care across different providers was difficult. With cloud collaboration and sharing, data integrity is maintained while improving access, communication and collaboration for better patient outcomes.
To fully realize the powerful benefits of cloud computing, the healthcare industry should thoughtfully strategize its cloud adoption.
Strategies for Successful Cloud Computing Implementation in Healthcare
Successful cloud implementation begins with a comprehensive plan and involves choosing the right cloud service provider.
Start by bringing all leadership stakeholders on board and developing a comprehensive cloud migration plan. This should entail both short-term and long-term initiatives as well as budget requests, clear timelines, current infrastructure assessments, risk analysis, detailed roles and responsibilities, and a thorough change management strategy.
Once you formalize and document your plan, vet the right cloud service provider for your specific healthcare needs. Assess features like usage tiers, data encryption tools, access controls, and account management support.
After you begin implementation, embrace continuous monitoring and incremental improvements that iterate on a strong foundation, moving the needle toward a robust cloud infrastructure. Aggregate both employee and customer feedback, ensuring teams follow data hygiene processes and best practices for security and compliance.
Explore Cloud Computing for Your Organization
The global big data healthcare market is expected to hit $540 billion by 2035, growing almost 20 percent over the next decade. AI is poised to continue its rapid innovation and adoption, and more organizations will move to cloud or hybrid environments to keep up. Explore transformative cloud computing solutions to improve operational efficiency, embrace flexibility, enhance regulatory compliance, and reduce data storage costs.
Our security engagement with Hilldrup turned into a cloud transformation project that lowered costs and freed up employee’s time.
Unlock the full potential of your healthcare organization with cloud solutions tailored to your needs. Connect with our Cloud Solutions team today. Contact us
