Sixty percent of healthcare executives say digital transformation is their most critical growth driver today. To that end, many large health systems are investing in the cloud, remote monitoring and home health.
In tandem with this digital transformation focus, healthcare data volume is growing at tremendous rates. Global spending on healthcare data storage grew from $4.88 billion in 2022 to $5.7 billion in 2023, with expected growth to exceed $10 billion by 2027.
While healthcare organizations are making significant investments in storing the medical and patient data they collect and purchase, many organizations still struggle to make use of their data to improve operations and patient outcomes.
Over the past three years, PwC and cloud service providers (CSPs), such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), have helped a number of leading healthcare organizations build their cloud services from the ground up to address critical, diverse patient and provider needs by turning centralized data into an asset.
Many organizations understand the potential of the data they possess — from developing value-based care offerings to using advanced imaging models and genomics research to detect anomalies. But healthcare providers do not typically have the time or resources to develop the underlying infrastructure required to utilize that data.
PwC and AWS are helping healthcare providers implement cloud platforms to cut through the complexity of their operational, administrative, clinical and research data and enhance accessibility, scale existing solutions and innovate faster.
Delivering on the capabilities of cloud
Recently, PwC helped build and expand the cloud presence for two healthcare providers, a regional health system and a leading specialty cancer care center.
For the regional provider, PwC and AWS completed the build of a cloud data platform that supports ingestion, transformation and consumption from numerous medical operations and financial data sources. PwC and the health system developed more than 50 analytical tools focusing on people analytics, primary care, medical group operations and general operations for health network staff and clinicians. Adding a digital front door gave patients self-service access to locate doctors, book appointments and more.
The cloud foundation enabled the specific use cases and acted as the platform from which to leverage data to determine new focus programs (such as cancer and cardiovascular) to address ambulatory and in-patient needs for the most at-risk populations in the care community.
For the specialty cancer care center, PwC helped refine a cloud strategy for the center’s leading-edge research and analytics capabilities. PwC supported the building and migration of applications for perioperative care, pathology, research and clinical testing to the AWS platform. PwC and the healthcare provider worked together to refactor components of existing applications and build new cloud-native applications to drive improvements in patient care and research.
While both organizations had different tactical goals for their cloud platforms, their objectives were underscored by the same fundamental desire: to accelerate their ability to deliver the best, most accurate care and outcomes.
Securing a data driven, cloud-powered future
In healthcare, data is an asset that drives tangible results. Better data can drive decisions that will save lives, accelerate research that was unimaginable a decade ago and improve patients’ and providers’ confidence in their ability to receive and deliver the best possible care.
PwC’s cloud transformation framework can help your organization achieve its data objectives. From security and efficiency through speed and innovation, we have teams that specialize in delivering healthcare-specific cloud solutions that meet personal health information (PHI) compliance requirements.
As the CIO of one health system said, “I was not interested in a cloud journey merely for archival or hosting of systems. That’s not creative for my organization. I was looking for something that was transformative, that had the vision of analytics data, but also when I start getting that data and those insights, can I turn that into actionable information?”
With extensive healthcare industry experience, PwC can meet clients where they are in their cloud journey and help them advance. In practice, that could mean delivering proactive recommendations about potential staff turnover to avoid care team burnout, leveraging predictive analytics for patient admission rates to support optimal staffing, or building tools to extend an existing, on-premises research model to leverage the latest cloud training technologies.
As patient populations and clinician expectations evolve, healthcare organizations need the right tools and experience from their technology and service provider partners to enable cost effective, quality, and differentiated outcomes.
For more information about our cloud solutions for healthcare, read more at PwC.Com – Cloud Transformation for Health Services.
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