In the current healthcare industry, staying ahead of the competition while providing exceptional patient care is of utmost importance. As a result, many healthcare organizations are turning towards cloud-based solutions to support their websites and applications. Becloud is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions for healthcare businesses, offering Amazon Web Services to help organizations achieve their goals and overcome common challenges.

Familiar IT challenges in Healthcare

Traditionally, healthcare organizations have managed heavy and expensive IT infrastructure to support their websites and applications. This system presents a range of challenges, such as high maintenance costs, risk to data security, and lack of scalability. These challenges can impede the delivery of quality patient care. With outdated content and poor site functionality, traditional websites and applications are holding them back for the following reasons:

Poor customer experience:

Patients expect an outstanding level of service regardless of clinic size. Healthcare websites and applications can be extraordinarily complex with many integrated systems, as a result, making any changes includes a steep cost. When a healthcare organization has multiple data sources, managing, these can be challenging or impossible for both internal staff and patients who need access to current health information. Content that is out of date, locked in the past and hard to find, does nothing but frustrate your patients and staff.

Lack of scalability:

Application traffic is unpredictable, and you must scale to support the spikes. The traditional method of paying for resources to support peak usage means those resources are often idle during periods of ordinary traffic, which costs the organization money. Building applications and websites using serverless technologies can dramatically reduce hosting bills because resources are charged only when they are needed. Systems that have been designed to support the flow of information between healthcare organizations, providers and patients can also be harder to scale in older on premise systems.

Downtime:

Interruptions due to maintenance on your webserver or Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, traffic spikes, or latency can all add up to lost business. On premises approaches are often too expensive to reasonably meet the up time, and response time customers expect from a modern practice. In turn, these unmet expectations lead to decreased web traffic, decreased patient care quality, and lost revenue.

Benefits of Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the leading provider of cloud computing services for businesses of all sizes. It offers a range of benefits to healthcare organizations, such as scalability and elasticity, cost savings, and improved security. With AWS, healthcare organizations can grow their business organically and take advantage of the additional resources available through an on-demand model. Moreover, AWS offers a comprehensive suite of security services to protect sensitive patient data. Lets discuss four notable benefits of Amazon Web Services below:

Scalability and Elasticity:

Amazon Web Services provides a cloud computing solution with the ability to scale resources. This means that healthcare organizations can instantly handle changes in traffic volume, or increase capacity when content needs to be updated. In addition, AWS offers high availability and fault tolerance on all its services.

Cost savings:

AWS offers cost savings for many essential IT services such as compute power, storage, and networking capabilities. Because of AWS pay-as-you-go pricing, healthcare organizations can save money by utilising only the resources they need. AWS additionally offers free usage-based credits to get started, with no long-term commitments or upfront costs. Combining this with the scalability and elasticity offered by AWS can significantly reduce costs.

Improved security:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has consistently demonstrated its ability to secure sensitive patient data stored on its platform. It provides a robust array of security services that secure data in all stages of its lifecycle, whether in transit, at rest, or in use. These services not only help to ensure that data is kept confidential and secure, but also help to maintain its integrity and availability.

In addition to the extensive security services offered by AWS, it also provides access controls to further protect data stored on its platform. These access controls allow customers to regulate who can access their data, and at what level of access they have. This helps to reduce the risk of data breaches or unauthorized access to sensitive information.

AWS has invested heavily in its security infrastructure and regularly undergoes security audits and assessments to ensure its platform continues to meet the highest security standards. With its impressive track record in securing sensitive data, AWS provides peace of mind for customers who need to maintain sensitive patient data in the cloud.

Unparalleled reliability:

AWS provides a reliable cloud with few outages, resulting in customers achieving a 69% reduction in unplanned downtime. AWS has a track record for being the highest-availability cloud, a status built on extensive investment in global availability zones and redundant networks, storage, and compute. High-availability through cloud infrastructure pairs massive scale with access to exactly the resources needed, providing a level of reliability not achievable with in house solutions.

How Becloud Makes AWS Work for Healthcare

At Becloud, we recognize the specific needs of healthcare organizations and work with them to build high-performing applications and integrations on AWS. Our services include access to a broad variety of AWS products and services, and our team of experts will help you choose the right tools at the right time to meet your goals. With Becloud, healthcare organizations can achieve the scalability they need to optimize resources and avoid large capital expenditures on in-house servers. Additionally, our cloud-based solutions offer unparalleled reliability and reduce unplanned downtime by 69%. Following is one case study of how BeCloud migrated a Electronic Health Record and Practice Management solution to the cloud for a customer.

Challenge:

The customer's solution was operating on outdated hardware located in a data center, and it was imperative to either replace the hardware or move to the cloud. Cost reduction, increased availability, and heightened security remain crucial concerns for the customer.

Solution:

The solution provided by BeCloud was optimized for efficiency by monitoring on-premise usage patterns. The process involved migrating databases and creating new, encrypted EC2 instances within a secure AWS managed Active Directory environment. Application streaming was facilitated through DCV, leading to secure access to applications hosted on the AWS platform.

Benefits:

By optimizing instances and shutting down EC2 instances during downtime, the solution obtained a drastic improvement in performance, responsiveness, and uptime, all while keeping costs low.

In conclusion, cloud-based solutions are the future of healthcare, offering organizations the ability to deliver a better patient experience, improve scalability and save costs. Becloud is a trusted partner for healthcare businesses, providing access to AWS and helping organizations develop high-performing applications. With our cloud-based solutions, healthcare organizations can focus on their mission-critical initiatives, while providing satisfied patients with a reliable and secure service.