Cloud computing has given a booster short to data driven insights for disease management. This together with secure collection and storage of patient data can reduce healthcare costs, said Sachin Nigam, CTO & co-founder, Goavega Software India.
Telemedicine, video consultations, wearable tech for monitoring vitals and AI powered assistants for patients needing constant care, have all become significant, as the pandemic forced the people into isolation, he added.
Thanks to a global pandemic, there has been an accelerated focus on the healthcare. As a result, digital adoption has also been the fastest in this sector, driven partly by the urgency of a fatal pandemic and partly due to the fast pace of technology innovation needed to adapt to a world of 'social distancing' and 'virtual' interactions, Nigam told Pharmabiz.
Quoting a report, he said that Indian digital healthcare market is estimated to reach Rs. 485.43 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of ~27.41% during the 2019-2024 period. Cloud computing is one of the major enablers for this innovation, including setting up a background infrastructure for implementation of other emerging tech solutions like AI and ML. The resulting digital transformation in healthcare and allied services is thus set to disrupt the consumer health and wellness tech experience and also drive wide scale tech adoption by hospitals and medical institutes.
We see cloud computing has set the digital transformation of healthcare, in motion. Data storage on cloud also enabled doctors to easily and promptly access this data, irrespective of geographical boundaries and beyond borders. These are the early days of virtual medical consultation and also the rise of data analytics and big data, he said.
With cloud enabled data collection and storage, analysing data became easier and led to the rise of data driven insights for research and development in pharma, faster and accurate diagnosis and treatment for patients, as well as a more informed approach for large scale disease management. Data analytics also greatly helped in predicting illnesses or disorders.
This, combined with a cloud supported data sharing and interaction platforms, made telemedicine and virtual doctor consultations, a reality!, he stated.
As cloud computing becomes widely accepted, it paves the way for easier integration with AI and ML platforms, to offer crucial clinical decisions and reduce treatment turnaround. It helps in wider adoption of hospital automation, AI and robotics in diagnostics and pharma as well as implementing robotic surgeries and strengthening the overall technology infrastructure for healthcare and allied fields.
With a data driven approach to healthcare, it is now easier and faster to predict illness, reduce the burden of disease, and to have a better preparedness to control its spread with timely prediction and early response with preventive healthcare practices.
Cloud computing has brought about a silent but impactful disruption across the healthcare sector, helping hospitals, laboratories, pharma companies and the entire healthcare frontline workers to lean on and find the support they desperately need, during these times. Needless to say, in the future, areas like personal wellness, wearable tech, diagnosis, pharma, and effective professional medical treatments, will be soon dominated by cloud supported technology innovations, making the process smarter, efficient, and reliable, said Nigam.
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