Using Amazon Web Services to Improve Efficiency in Healthcare - Case Study Example

? USING AMAZON WEB SERVICES TO IMPROVE EFFICIENCY IN HEALTHCARE Researchers, analysts and organizations alike appear to agree that Amazon Web services, with great emphasis on cloud computing; will in the near future become a crucial trend having a huge impact on businesses and how they are practiced. Big technology organizations are by now making investments worth million of dollars to facilitate these services. It remains to be witnessed how these services will affect the healthcare sector which has over the years been seen as being diverse, unique, and complex presenting several challenges like privacy. Additionally, the ever rising healthcare costs are one more concern that needs to be dealt with and also improving the quality of service to patients. Efforts are being made to try and reduce for patients and information technology acting as the primary enabler for this. It will be quite interesting to observe how these services will contribute towards and address these matters in the health industry. The aim of this paper is to discover the present-day state and trending of these services in the healthcare industry. Problem identification and definition Healthcare organizations and hospitals are experiencing difficult times, having to cope with increasing service and product demands within their inadequate budgets, while at the same time complying with healthcare restructurings and regulations. For all the inventions transforming the healthcare business, there is still one area where it remains nearly universally late; the application of information technology. Most healthcare systems are based on analogue workflows which comprises of paper-based health records, duplicated test results, and handwritten note which are usually inefficient and inconvenient in one way or another. As a result, information retrieval and updating remains slow, this in turn, leads to incompetent provision of treatment and patient care (Bower, 2012). Problem solution Amazon Web Services (also known as AWS) is a pool of remote computing services (that are also referred to as web services) that all together form a cloud computing platform and services, accessible over the Internet via Amazon.com (Tyrrell, 2009). Amazon Web Services provide a complete set of application services and infrastructure that enable one to run virtually anything in the cloud: this represents everything from big data projects and enterprise applications to mobile apps and social games. These services, to name a few include: the amazon simple storage services known as S3: Amazon S3 offers an extremely durable and accessible store for an assortment of content, extending from media files to web applications. It lets you offload your whole storage arrangement onto the cloud, where you can gain from Amazon S3’s pay-as-you-go pricing and scalability to manage your growing storage needs, distributing your content straight from Amazon S3. Another important service is the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2, which allows the renting of virtual computers to, different users, which to run their personal computer applications. A user can launch, create and terminate server instances paying for the services by the hour therefore the term elastic. Another valuable amazon service is the database storage which enables users to store and access large amounts of data. Whether one is keeping pharmaceutical data for scrutiny and analysis, fiscal data for pricing and computation, photographs for resizing, S3 is the best location for storage of original content. One can then send these contents to EC2 for resizing, computation, or other large scale analytics without sustaining any data transfer charges for transferring the data between the services. (Soman, 2011 Pp. 78) There is a lot of conversation on Amazon web services and how these services could be used in a way to benefit healthcare practices. The healthcare industry, through Amazon Web Services, is able to reduce costs, improve care, and realize business suppleness amongst other services, in spite of the supposed privacy and security challenges. How amazon web services help solve the problem Collaboration and sharing In most cases precise information may be required in two places, by unlike health services providers at the exact same time. Thanks to cloud technologies, the information is harmonized and is shared in real time (James, 2011). With the application of Cloud computing, healthcare professionals especially doctors across the world can work in partnership in real time and share info thus eliminating the need to invest in costly infrastructure. The Cloud therefore, provides an incorporated platform over which healthcare professionals can get to access scans, reports, prescriptions, electronic medical records (EMRs) and patient information such as insurance claims details, prescriptions from history treatments, not to forget lab reports from any parts whatsoever of the entire globe so long as the information was uploaded. Having a central warehouse for patient data will greatly help to alleviate the possibilities of the prescription of the wrong treatment or misdiagnosis, as well help in eliminating the chances of contradictory diagnosis where different healthcare professionals and different institutions are involved in treating a particular patient (Fung, 2009). Speed Since medical information is life saving, there is need to access them sooner than later. One of the key reasons for several tests is medics not having the access to the records of other medics. A chief cloud computing advantage is the capability to share and work together amid healthcare facility providers. Information, inform of records, is shared in real time, raising the overall efficiency and speed of health care. On demand access of patient data is thus made available for the qualified physicians leading to efficient administration of health care (Braunstein, 2013). Also, cloud-based tools are able to easily upgrade and progress their features more rapidly, less expensively and with negligible or no service disruption. Plus, cloud services allow faster access to vital statistics and patient records for health services providers and for their patients. Mobility Amazon web services can easily be accessed using mobile applications. Each mobile app is usually backed up by a cloud set-up. By storage of computing power and data in the cloud, health care service providers are able to easily enable their staff to have access to patient information anytime and anywhere. Authorized hospitals and physicians no longer need to be tied inside their offices or hospital computers to look up patient records and past diagnosis. With ever more and more doctors only finding some time in the evening to go through patient records and examine already run tests, or to do research, this over and over again means being stuck in the office hours. With Amazon web services for data storage like cloud computing, doctors can without difficulty, pull up whichever patient details and treatment records remotely. Another way in which these services create mobility is: cloud computing is seen to fit very well with the rising number of mobile health care professionals who may at any given time need to administer services from very remote locations, this enables authorized physicians to provide much better patient care at a much lower costs without sacrificing or compromising on their value of work and efficiency (Zielin?ski, 2011). Security and privacy Data that is sustained over the internet about hospital patients may contain private, personal and very confidential information that maybe very vital to the owner. Such information requires thorough safeguarding so as to prevent misuse, disclosure or compromise. Leakage of such information may most definitely expose a medical institution to law suites. Globally, issues of privacy are being taken in with keenness and strict jurisdiction (Robinson, 2008). Computerized data may help in this case since the data that is stored can be made accessible only to authorized parties. Only certain staff and qualifies physicians can be given access to certain information through the administration of usernames and passwords (James, 2011). Such service providers are required by law to fully comply with various privacy standards such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).  Amazon web services providers are in compliance with HIPAA. Decreased costs There is now no need for the health care institutions and authorized physicians to make investments in initial acquisition of hardware equipment and in their maintenance. This is because these concerns have already been taken care of by the Amazon Web Services providers. Cost cutbacks are two way: this means that both the patients and the health care provider or medical organization benefit from the cost savings. The patient does not have to suffer paying for the same test more than once when they go to visit different doctors or medical specialists, or if incase the test results are lost or misplaced. Also, medical offices or organizations, especially, do not have to pay for on site hardware set-up, personnel and storage or to hire personnel needed to continuously maintain these records. Unlike on site hardware set-up, these computerized data storage and access services solutions can easily be scaled up or down. Health care service providers are usually known to have a heap of records for each and every patient. Information ranging from present day prescriptions to run patient tests results to patient appointment information. The quantity of information that each health care service provider has to work with could, with no trouble, and very quickly overpower any on site hardware (Spekowius, 2008). This also means that, hospitals, predominantly the big ones, are capable of providing IT as a service minus the costly and always complex investments in hardware infrastructure and their applications, releasing them to put more focus on the more strategic business resourcefulness while delivering improved service levels, increased business suppleness at much lower costs. With cloud computing, storage, cloud server solutions can be speedily scaled up to take care of the extra data that is supposed to be added every time a patient visits the hospital and is diagnosed. This in turn reduces the capital expenditure and also the operational overhead. The big advantage is hospitals end up paying only for the services that they use, short of having to maintain or sustain initial hardware infrastructure costs, giving health care businesses the technical tools to come to be more responsive (Soman, 2011). Cloud computing's pay per use model means that health care providers can influence the up to date software solutions while at the same time keeping the operating costs at the least possible, and covering only the fundamentals. Furthermore, the pay as you go model enables organizations to pay simply for what they consume thus no hiring of unnecessary staff is needed. Graphical summary of benefits (Soman, 2011 Pp 90) Implementation of the solutions To put the above solutions into practice, there is need to training of hospital staff to first ensure that they are computer illiterate. The next thing is to make them understand just how important moving towards these methods of computing are and how it will be of benefit to them by reducing a whole lot of workload. Also computers should be made available together with all the appropriate software so as be able to use the services which are entirely computerized. Challenges faced Security; confidentiality, security and privacy are strict issues that must be observed to the latter when dealing with medical records. These are issues that have been seen to slow down the progress and adoption of such web services and should be addressed with the great attention that they require so as to enable trust of such services by organizations which want to embrace them. Interoperability; is one of the biggest challenges yet, facing the adoption of IT services in the healthcare industry. Different systems are designed using different OS's, database systems, programming languages and different platforms. Therefore, I is required that software developers cooperate and share conjoint data models keep in mind that the products need to interact with each other when designing. Not to forget that the products must be within the required legal frameworks and principles so as to be in accordance with the requirements of HIPAA. Conclusion Amazon Web services presents healthcare organizations with an opportunity for them to improve on patient care, protect patients' privacy in accordance with the privacy policies, and lessen the risks related with employing expensive technology. Correctly implementing and making the most of information technology will in the long run yield healthcare practices huge benefits, with Amazon Web Services offering improved admission to health care services and information that would consequently result in improved results, smaller number errors and greater than before cost savings. Although in the beginning, adoption of such services will be difficult especially due to resistance by staff. Resistance in such cases is caused by the fear of being replaced my computer services or fear of being deskilled. Appropriate training should be done in places that do not already use such services since this cuts the government expenditure, such expenditure could be used in other areas of the medical sector such as purchasing drugs. The current trend in adoption of these web services and more so cloud computing in the field of medicine can lead to the improvement and solving of several inter linked information issues in health organization as well as cost augmentations. Standard cloud based applications will be seen to bring obvious benefits to health organizations, insurance companies, and most importantly physicians and patients. Challenges such as interoperability and security concerns will always be there though at any given time the advantages will outweigh the challenges. Through the employment of best practices in the designing, placement and use of it will generate future growth of the health care sector as a whole, hopefully. References Bower, A. G. (2012). The Diffussion and Value of Healthcare Information Technology. Santa Monica: Rand Corp. Braunstein, M. L. (2013). Health Informatics in the cloud. New york: Springer. Fung, M. (2009). The impact of information technology in healthcare privacy. Auckland: Auckland press. James C Lin, K. S. (2011). Wireless Mobile communication and Healthcare. Berlin: Springe. James P. (2011). Computers in Healthcare. cloud computing, 50. Robinson, D. (2008). Amazon web services made simple. Brisbane: Australia. Soman, A. K. (2011). Cloud computing in healthcare. Enfield: Science Publishers. Spekowius, G., & Wendler, T. (2008). Advances in healthcare technology : shaping the future of medical care. Dordrecht : Springer. Tyrrell, S. (2009). Using the internet in healthcare. Abingdon: Radcliffe Medical. Zielin?ski, K., Duplaga, M., & Ingram, D. (2011). Information technology solutions for Healthcare. London: Springer. Read More