This is how cloud computing can assist healthcare professionals

It is of crucial importance in many healthcare fields to monitor patients closely. A challenge arises when the patient is no longer close to the health professional, or in a medical facility. Cloud computing offers a valuable solution, connecting healthcare professionals to the patients’ data in real-time. 

Consider a patient recovering from a recent surgery or enduring long-covid, and a hospital or healthcare practitioner that needs to monitor them from their home or even while they are on the move. Internet-connected healthcare monitoring devices fundamentally enable this. Typically the hospital IT systems are not externally accessible, for many reasons but paramount is security - making it impossible to create a direct connection between the patient and the hospital to share data. This is where cloud computing provides a solution, by creating a cost-effective and long-term simple solution. The connected device enables the patient to upload the required data in real-time while being in their home or private situation, which can be retrieved within hospitals as desired, with the bonus that it can also be in real-time.  

It is highly scalable
Technically, cloud computing is a safe bet, says software architect Erwin Bonsma. With the templates and experience at TOPIC, ‘It is fairly easy to develop a proof of concept, it can take as little as two weeks. Data is stored in the cloud and not on a server, which makes it – and this is probably the biggest advantage – a very scalable solution. You can start with a pilot group of patients and then scale as desired, without worrying about the required computer infrastructure. A properly designed, serverless cloud architecture can easily scale to hundreds of thousands of patients - distributed across the whole EU.’  

Critical - Data security: how is it looked after?
A key concern for many healthcare professionals and facilities is management of data protection: a hospital is, of course, legally responsible for protecting their patient’s data. The cloud computing solutions that are designed and implemented at TOPIC meet the highest level of GDPR standards. Cloud storage is encrypted by default and cloud services implement state-of-the-art security best practices, allowing for focus on the application-specific security challenges. The same holds for redundant storage and back-ups, which ensures that data does not get lost. ‘It makes cloud computing a very scalable and safe bet.’       

For more information check : showcases/cloud-connected-sense-and-act