Healthcare to Benefit Most from Cloud Computing

John Sculley, former Apple CEO, believes that cloud computing is powerful enough to completely revolutionize healthcare systems worldwide. Sculley told The Guardian that he was quite confident that cloud computing would ring in the changes when it comes to the way we approach healthcare in the next couple of decades and that large data analytics would be central to the change.

A keynote speaker at the Cloud Computing Forum and Managing Partner of InflexionPoint, Sculley went on to explain why cloud especially was a central point of interest.

With the overall movement to cloud, the curve is accelerating upwards at such an advanced level that basically means that the market is seeing new technologies that allow people to do things no one even thought were possible two or three years ago.

A portion of this curve, according to Sculley, may be credited to the price of data storage which has fallen. Sculley observed that there has never been a technology that was able to commoditise this fast.

Healthcare is a sector that will most likely benefit from cloud computing the most and soon. Public infrastructure is proving inefficient which makes new technologies necessary. The solution lies in innovation, not in apportioning the costs.

Doctors, for example, need to be reimbursed and paid for procedures and consultation. For the payments to get through, accurate and updated records must be in place which includes how patients respond to treatment, what the whole lot cost, etc. This is where cloud computing will help with a little adjustment. A system needs to be programmed to focus on the patient. It should also be a system that does not collect data but also analyse the data.

A system  analytics should be utilised to allow the real time tracking of people’s vital signs – whether it is their pulse, their weight, fluid retention or even something as complex as proteomics – the dynamics of proteins in the human body.

Data should be formatted in a way that makes it useable to make forecasts and make results measurable. This puts healthcare at a completely new level.

Cloud computing could be the perfect platform to allow these real-time analytics available on a much bigger scale. The natural evolution of this process is the biggest change in the World Wide Web. This is something that is certain to completely alter the technology landscape as it stands now. It is a connection of machines influencing the lives of people.

Basically, this is just the starting point of an age of extremely powerful sensors that can be incorporated into just about anything and that can be used as tracking devices for almost every conceivable purpose. Cloud computing will provide the means to shape this data into a vast number of orders that are progressively larger and more involved than anything we have heretofore thought of.

What kind of timeframe are we looking at? It could take anywhere between five and fifteen years before the impact is actually seen but there is little doubt that this impact will do for healthcare what personal computers did for the man in the street.