Cloud technology is changing the game in retail, streaming, and financial realms—especially when it comes to quickly processing generative AI.
It’s also become essential for health care providers, who are more and more reliant on the cloud to make not only their own lives easier, but those of their patients. In fact, say experts, when it comes to the healthcare space, the cloud is really having a moment.
“You do everything online now for banking, but healthcare tends to lag,” Dr. Patrick McGill, a family physician and the executive vice president and chief transformation officer at Community Health Network in Indianapolis, tells Fortune. “And we’re just now to the point where the technology can handle our electronic medical records in the cloud.”
Cloud technology means, in the simplest terms, “that computing resources are not on premises,” explains Carolyn McGregor, professor, dean, and research chair in AI for Health and Wellness at Ontario Tech University.
Another way to think about it, adds Sameer Sethi, senior vice president and chief AI and insights officer at Hackensack Meridian Health in New Jersey, is that a third party is employed to maintain and manage the infrastructure required to house all the software used by a business, such as a hospital.
And it’s a setup that’s beneficial to all involved, he adds, including patients, as the goal should be “not to make technology the center of the action, but to make technology an enabler of great patient outcomes, experience, and quality and safety.”
Here are three ways healthcare is leveraging cloud technology to do just that.
Better doctor-patient connection
Seems counterintuitive that technology can help personalize the doctor-patient connection, right? But, explains Sethi, the cloud plus AI can help a provider quickly and accurately make patient predictions and treatment plans through clinical summarization tools.
“Generally, for your visit, physicians are staring at the screen. And what they’re really doing is they’re looking through the patient record,” he says. Thanks to cloud technology running more and more systems, including at Hackensack Meridian, “they press a button and the clinical notes are summarized.”
What that does, says McGill, is enable the doctor to make more specific clinical decisions—on the spot.
“In the past, we had to rely on some very basic tools,” he says, and since 80% of healthcare data tends to live in unstructured notes, it’s always been a challenge to quickly and succinctly analyze patient needs. “You can now look at the entire chart, all the notes and everything else, with the cloud technologies,” he says.
Seamless records-sharing and physician collaborations
While patients may have zero realization that cloud computing has changed the game, says McGill, “what they would see is that they had a more frictionless experience of getting their lab results from another system, or maybe getting their prescription authorized, or prior authorization. Whereas in the past, it relied heavily on fax machines and things like that.”
It can also bring ease of use for sharing through an electronic health record system, too.
This means that when you go to a different healthcare facility and they want to exchange information with your previous provider—sharing an x-ray or MRI or lab report, for example—it’s a breeze.
“Healthcare facilities are being asked to innovate—they’re being asked to provide a whole lot of different services and to introduce new systems… [so] all you’re doing is needing to create ways for physicians to log in, and for patients to log in, as opposed to setting everything up inside the hospital,” says McGregor, such as with a patient portal.
That’s particularly helpful in mental health, she says, where people may be facing long wait times to see an expert following a referral; through cloud technology, a referring provider can keep an eye on the patient, and keep in contact, in order to monitor their mental health state in case an emergency intervention is needed.
“If that’s escalating, then you want to be able to flag it so that they can be moved up the queue,” McGregor says.
Improved cybersecurity
Cyberattacks on the health care industry have been on the rise—and the Change Healthcare cyberattack in 2024 served as a wakeup call about that to many. But with cloud technology, say experts, health care data—and, by extension, patients—are left in a less vulnerable position.
Cloud providers, explains McGregor, “have to comply with privacy legislation. They have to comply with cybersecurity protection—and the individual organization now doesn’t have to put in place all of these structures that they’re relying on the cloud provider for.” That means a higher potential for safety.
“It’s safer,” says Sethi, “because these companies that we’re giving the cloud business to do this for a living. So they just don’t have to worry about Hackensack—they have to worry about others as well… They have to make sure it’s done from from 10 different angles.”
And if an attack does happen, says McGill, “the ability to isolate data or isolate systems and spin up disaster recovery systems is much easier in the cloud than it is when you have things on prem… and that leads to patient safety.”