Cloud computing has been promoted as providing numerous benefits to organizations, from greater flexibility and cost efficiency to disaster recovery and improved competitiveness – and now, helping to save lives.
Cloud-based services are providing support to health organizations like the Henry Ford Health System and Baptist Health System, allowing them to overcome time and cost-consuming inefficiencies that can delay patient diagnosis and treatment.
These hospital systems are just two of more than 150 implementations of AT&T ForHealth and other healthcare IT solutions adopted by healthcare providers and payers within the U.S. since late 2010. In 2012, cloud and mobility-based solutions helped AT&T to generate $5.6 billion in revenue from healthcare industry businesses – up from $4 billion in 2009.
Healthcare systems provide physicians with the ability to access, view and share medical images and associated reports in the cloud, ultimately providing patients with more timely diagnoses and treatments.
Cloud-based repositories are helping hospitals store, access and share medical imaging for more connected healthcare.
For example, Detroit-based Henry Ford Heart & Vascular Institute (HVI), part of the Henry Ford Health System, generates 25,000 cardiac images each year. The hospital needed a solution to store these increasingly large files, but a substantial investment for additional onsite IT storage infrastructure would only partially address the issue, according Kevin Yee, administrator of cardiology at Henry Ford Health System.
HVI installed AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management, and as a result, HVI cardiologists at eight locations have real-time access to a single cloud-based, highly secure repository of their patients’ medical images.
“Before incorporating this AT&T solution, our storage technology was aging and we had no centralized access to cardiology images for our cardiologists,” Yee said in a statement. “We’ve been using AT&T’s cloud-based medical imaging service for more than a year. And now, our doctors can now easily view patients’ images and files for specialized consults.”
In addition, storing the images offsite promotes business continuity and image security, so that the images and files are available when needed.
In Birmingham, Ala., Baptist Health System is using AT&T Medical Imaging and Information Management with an FDA-cleared mobile diagnostic viewer. With access to medical images in the AT&T cloud, referring physicians can easily review patients’ images stored in a vendor-neutral format.
Doctors in this hospital system can also use their tablet or smartphone to access and diagnose patients the moment radiology images, such as MRI or CT scans, are available – all without outlaying any capital expense, according to Richard Shirey, chief information officer at Baptist Health System.
“We knew we needed to replace our onsite long-term archive to take full advantage of the benefits of the latest innovative technology,” Shirey said. “Speed and accuracy are critical. That’s why we’re working with AT&T. Our physicians will be able to access a patient’s images faster and with less overhead through the cloud-based repository.”
The global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry was valued at $1.82 billion in 2011, and is expected to reach $6.79 billion by 2018, growing at a CAGR of 21.3 percent from 2012 to 2018, according to Transparency Market Research.
Strong growth in the healthcare market is attributed to the need for healthcare organizations to manage and optimize their complex IT systems, provide faster and flexible healthcare delivery to patients and physicians through mobile and other easy access systems, facilitate compliance with regulatory standards and maintain confidentiality regarding patient data.
Edited by
Braden Becker
