The relationship between healthcare and technology is evolving rapidly – from IT teams supporting backend operations, right through to frontline patient delivery. Where in-person visits to the doctor were once the norm, patients are now becoming more accustomed to digital consultations and the use of apps to manage their health and wellbeing at home. The healthcare crisis of 2020, along with challenges including staff shortages and a globally ageing population, has only served to catalyse this, sparking a shift to the mainstream use of telehealth and digital-only patient engagement.
To cater to this new demand for a digital-first approach, the healthcare sector is turning to IT modernisation to ensure their technology platforms can be effectively upgraded and expanded to meet the requirements of modern, efficient, and effective care. The question is, how can organisations within the industry perform these upgrades at scale without breaking the bank? Crucially, how can this be done without causing disruption to patients – whether it’s a regular check-up or life-saving treatment?
Here, we explore the decisions that must be made within the healthcare sector when it comes to migrating applications to the cloud, how they can be overcome, and the benefits VMware Cloud on AWS can offer to patients and medical staff alike.
Why VMware Cloud on AWS for digital transformation in the healthcare sector?
The main priority for the healthcare system today is ensuring patients receive the best care possible and are treated efficiently and effectively. VMware Cloud on AWS allows healthcare institutions to modernise their data centres, making it easier for them to deliver real-time connected healthcare and scale IT infrastructure on-demand to seamlessly interconnect hundreds of sites, devices and data sources from multiple locations.
Where patient delivery is crucial, VMware Cloud on AWS prioritises rapid time to value with the ability to spin up an entire VMware Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) in the AWS Cloud, delivering in under two hours on average and scale host capacity in minutes.
It accelerates real-time, connected healthcare and delivers exceptional experiences to clinicians for remote-first work and provides patients with digital-first engagement while safeguarding protected health information (PHI) everywhere.
The challenges of cloud migration in healthcare
Some of the key challenges healthcare customers face while adopting hybrid cloud are inconsistent infrastructures between private cloud and public cloud, forcing customers to re-architect or refactor existing applications while moving to cloud, thus increasing risks, costs and complexity.
Additional challenges range from dealing with the complexity of using multiple management tools to manage on-premises and cloud environment, to understanding the differences in operational model and inability to leverage established on-premises governance, security and operational policies while taking advantage of cloud-scale and agility. As well as this, many providers continue to run a patchwork of old and new applications and platforms as well as many different types of devices—all from different vendors which makes connecting care for optimal outcomes harder.
Finally, as healthcare organisations hold a wealth of sensitive data – ensuring storage systems are both resilient and secure is a priority. A lack of security and compliance certifications might lead to security vulnerabilities of sensitive PHI (Protective Healthcare Information) data.
By choosing to rely on a cloud-based system in contrast to traditional infrastructure, healthcare institutions can enjoy built-in security and resilience. Cloud based systems such as VMware Cloud on AWS ensures security through functions such as content filtering and firewall parameters, essential to preventing disruption and to keeping staff and patients from falling victim to ransomware or other attacks.
Driving innovation through hybrid cloud
Patients and staff have already seen several innovative new digital services arrive on the scene, but many institutions may find most of their mission-critical applications still depend heavily on traditional infrastructure. This not only takes valuable budget away from innovation to cover maintenance costs, but with transformation high on the agenda, also increases the risk of major disruption.
VMware Cloud on AWS provides healthcare organisations with an on-demand, scalable hybrid cloud service that enables them to seamlessly extend, migrate, and protect their infrastructure in the cloud. And once in the cloud, they can start their application modernisation journey with minimal disruption, with the same architecture and operational experience on-premises and in the cloud.
There is huge potential for better application and infrastructure deployment in the healthcare sector through assessing physical, virtual, and cloud environments, as well as centralised management and automation. The challenges lie in execution – and particularly in delivering change to IT infrastructure at scale, by putting staff’s ability to do their work and patient delivery at the forefront.
A partnership of excellence
VMware and AWS have a long history of providing public and private healthcare institutions with software products that simplify the overall operation and management of IT. As part of their commitment to deliver technologies that help organisations modernise their IT infrastructure, these two industry-leading private and public cloud providers respectively – offer healthcare organisations hybrid cloud services to leverage a consistent cloud infrastructure, both on-premises and in the public cloud, that ultimately provides the foundations for better patient services and care.
Click to find out how you can modernise your healthcare IT infrastructure with VMware Cloud on AWS today.
