As we come to a close on 2012, everyone’s making their predictions for next year. This year I have had the opportunity to write about Cloud computing and its impact on so many areas.
But where do I think it will have the biggest impact in 2013? Only in an industry that is expected to be a $5.4 billion market by 2017, Healthcare.
Typically slow to adapt new technologies due to very legitimate reasons such as data security and privacy, the Health Care industry is perfectly poised to reap the benefits cloud has to offer.
How?
Imagine this: it’s March 2013, you live in New York and have been suffering from severe headaches. You decide to make an appointment and visit the doctor for blood tests, an MRI, and a physical exam. The doctor discovers the issue, gives you a prescription, and sends you home.
Six months later, with the medication working well, your company sends you to San Diego for a long-term assignment. Two weeks into this new experience, your head starts hurting again, and the pills you were originally prescribed are not helping. You can’t go back to NYC to see your doctor, so you visit a different one in San Diego.
Enter Cloud Computing
If both your doctors utilized cloud computing, there would be no need to wait for the MRI Image to be shipped from one coast to the next. There would be no need for your doctors to get on the phone because all their notes with all your records were quickly transferred, in turn providing you with the actual treatment you need in real time.
Disruptive Innovation
So my prediction? The healthcare industry will experience a disruptive innovation around Cloud computing being implemented in more and more hospitals and doctor’s offices. It won’t be long before both doctors and patients alike recognize the benefits of time saving (waiting rooms, duplicate tests), the delivery of images (which are actually very large, taking up gigabytes of information on on-premise databases), and of course, cost savings on the locally maintained hardware.
