Speeding Up Healthcare Innovation Leveraging Cloud Technology

Cloud computing has experienced tremendous growth in the last decade. The combined cloud revenue from AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft was at $49B in 2018, and exploded to $206B in 2022. According to Future Market Insights estimates that cloud services revenue will grow at an average rate of 21% annually to reach $4.4 trillion by 2033.  There is no turn back on this cloud migration tidal wave, and for a good reason as many companies across many industries reaped the benefits of going to the cloud. Healthcare industry has been a late comer to this trend, but has seen acceleration in the last 5 years as many progressive healthcare companies embraced the cloud to speed up innovation to gain competitive advantage. Here are few examples where pioneering healthcare companies took advantage of cloud to speed up their digitization and innovation initiatives.

• HCA partners with GCP to accelerate advanced analytics platform and decision-support capabilities suing AI. HCA is one of the biggest hospital systems in the US and it plans to migrate its massive clinical and non-clinical data to Google Cloud and leverage AI and cloud infrastructure to speed up its advanced analytics platform (HCA enters new partnership with Google Cloud | Healthcare IT News)
• Mayo Clinic enters 10-years partnership with GCP to build its Cloud Data platform. Mayo Clinic is one of the world-renowned research clinics and it “hopes to leverage Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to advance its digital diagnostics, augment its ability to conduct medical research and improve treatment precision and clinical outcomes.” (Mayo Clinic, Google announce 10-year cloud data partnership | Healthcare Dive)
• Electronic Health Record technology vendor also embraces cloud to speed up its innovation. Cerner is one of the biggest electronic health record vendors in the world and it has partnered with AWS to host its leading EHR system. (Cerner Partners with Amazon Web Services for Cloud-Based EHR (ehrintelligence.com)
• Dedalus, an EU leading g healthcare and diagnostic software provider in Europe and one of the largest in the world, providing solutions that touch more than 540 million people across 6,300 healthcare organizations in 40 countries, teams up with AWS to migrate it leading electronic health record system to AWS cloud in EU. “We hear from our customers that they need solutions for the enormous challenges they face related to security, continuity, reliability, performance and cost. Our customers have seen concrete benefits of utilizing AWS, like reducing operating costs by leveraging the elasticity of the cloud, as well as the reduced impact on carbon footprint and the performance improvement for end users.” According to the CEO of Dedalus.
• Health Plans in the US also jump into cloud action. Humana enters a 7-years agreement with Microsoft to provide cloud services. Humana is one of the largest healthcare insurance companies in the US covering more than 17 million members. (Humana, Microsoft ink 7-year deal for cloud services | Healthcare Dive)
• Even the US government does not want to be left behind in the cloud adoption. It uses AWS to implement and host its healthcare.gov application which serves as a healthcare market place for more than 2.5 people without health insurance. (Healthcare.gov Case Study - Amazon Web Services (AWS))
• How about another well documented inspirational story of how Moderna uses AWS cloud to complete the sequence for its groundbreaking mRNA vaccine in just two days (AWS Innovator: Moderna | Case Studies, Videos and Customer Stories (amazon.com))
• Or World Health Organization (WHO) was able to launch its COVID-19 App 12 months earlier by using AWS (Amazon Helps World Health Organization Launch Covid-19 App 12 Months Early (forbes.com)
• Cloud adoption by healthcare industry is a world-wide trend. Just look how New South Wales in Australia delivers 4.25 million test results using AWS during the Pandemic (New South Wales Health Pathology Case Study | Healthcare | AWS (amazon.com))

Cloud is not only used by healthcare companies spark innovation, it is also being used to improve health equity. For example, AWS Health Equity Initiative (New Global Program to Help Customers Develop Cloud Solutions to Advance Health Equity - Amazon Web Services) supported an Australian company Kynd to expand its user base by 335% on its platform that helps people living with disabilities on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) find, book and manage their NDIS support worker. 

Surgery is one of the few areas where technical innovation has been lacking behind. Cloud technology is also profoundly changing how surgery is performed and delivered. For example, during the Pandemic when access to the OR room was strictly limited, Caresyntax developed a cloud based tele-presence technology to extend the surgical collaboration beyond the 4-walls of the operating room (Cx-Connect - Telepresence Technology for Surgery by Caresyntax (medical-xprt.com).  The cloud infrastructure is critical in enabling low latency live OR video streaming through internet to remote participants. The same technology can be used to enable remote surgical coaching and education to improve surgeon surgical skill and proficiency and ultimately improve surgical outcomes.

Surgical videos are information rich asset that is a prime target to apply AI technology to analyze them. Given the massive size of surgical videos, cloud storage is the only viable solution that offers unlimited ability to scale.  Increasingly digitization of OR means recoding and uploading surgical videos to the cloud, and use them to train AI models and in turn applying AI models to analyze surgical videos to identify opportunity for surgical skill improvement.  This OR digitization approach is not only the vision and mission of Caresyntax, but also shared by a research team at Japan National Cancer Center which uses Microsoft Cloud to transform surgery using data, AI, and cloud. Transforming surgery with data, AI, and cloud - Microsoft Stories Asia

The recent Gen AI advancement only help to accelerate the cloud adoption across all industries, including healthcare. Gen AI is the disruptive technology that is going to transform every industry.  To leverage Gen AI technology, a company has to build applications in the cloud because that is where all high performance Gen AI models live, whether it is Microsoft ChatGPT, Google Cloud’s Med-PaLM, Meta’s Llama, or AWS’s BedRock. One of the key reasons is because only the cloud infrastructure can provide the massive computing power needed to train and run these Large Language Models (LLM), and developing AI application in the cloud would be the only viable option now for any company to meaningfully harnessing the power of Gen AI technology to further transform surgery, for good.

There are many examples and case studies over the Pandemic period how healthcare providers used cloud technology to create innovative way to deliver healthcare services to patients. The Catalan Institute of Health (ICS) and the Catalan Government’s Center for Telecommunications (CTTI) partnered with Fujitsu and VMware to roll out a resilient cloud project that enables 40,000 health workers the secure remote access to medical records and allows them to provide healthcare services to patients whenever and wherever they are. This is one perfect example of how Cloud technology breaks down the confines of hospitals and expanding and extending the reach of health care to every corner of the society (How we digitally transformed the frontlines of Spain’s healthcare system : FUJITSU BLOG - Global)

Governments around the world also are embracing cloud infrastructure to better support government operation and serve their citizens. For example, the US government teams up with AWS and create GovCloud on AWS with government defined security standard FedRAMP certified.  All government customers and partners can now use GovCloud to conduct business securely (AWS GovCloud (US) - Amazon Web Services).  Similar effort has been made by German T-System and Google Cloud to create Sovereign Cloud for public and private companies in Germany that complies with all laws and regulations in EU and Germany. (Google is building a 'next-generation' cloud for Germany | ZDNET).  Spain has also been engaging Google Cloud to build s Sovereign Cloud solution for the public and private companies in Spain that will allow them to accelerate their digital transformation while meeting the highest levels of trust, security, privacy and sovereignty. Google Cloud Partners With Minsait to Boost Digital Sovereignty in Spain (prnewswire.com)