Moving to the cloud is a big decision that requires considerable investment in time and money. To make the case for the cloud, healthcare organizations often initially focus on the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure from the perspective of the CIO. Those benefits include increased agility, improved scalability, and lower operating costs.
However, the value of the cloud permeates the entire organization in functions such as compliance, marketing, corporate operations, and even clinical operations. Providers who implement the public cloud can better adapt to rapid changes in demand, suffer fewer outages that affect employees and customers, and adopt innovative healthcare technologies that improve patient care and outcomes. Payers realize higher levels of productivity and can better support analytics to help reduce healthcare costs and drive marketing campaigns.
The journey to cloud business value in healthcare
Moving to the cloud is not a binary operation but a series of successive steps each of which leads to higher levels of cloud maturity, realizing more benefits at every stage. Cloudticity developed the Cloud Value Journey model to show how the business benefits of cloud accrue over time to stakeholders throughout the healthcare organization (see figure 1). By understanding where their organization stands at any given time, executives can better assess the opportunities that cloud currently provides as well as anticipate those in the future.
The stages of the journey include:
Transitioning:
This initial stage is where healthcare entities begin their journey to the cloud. Here, the focus is on understanding the cloud environment, planning the migration, and taking the first steps toward moving data and applications to the cloud. Key activities include assessing the current IT infrastructure, identifying cloud-suitable applications, and ensuring staff training for basic cloud competencies. The benefits are primarily visible to the CIO and CFO, but they highlight the fact that the cloud delivers tangible business value sooner rather than later.
Benefits:
- Reduce costs with switch to OpEx from CapEx
- Scale and adapt seamlessly
- Empower experimentation
Compliant:
In this stage, the emphasis is on meeting the rigorous compliance and regulatory requirements that are crucial in healthcare. Entities work on implementing and maintaining compliance with standards like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the cloud. This involves setting up secure and compliant data storage, network configurations, and ensuring that patient data is protected and privacy standards are met.
Some healthcare stakeholders are understandably concerned about moving PHI and other sensitive information out of the data center and into this nebulous thing called the cloud. Reaching the Compliant milestone can go a long way to reassuring stakeholders that moving to the cloud is more than just an IT thing, but delivers real benefits in other areas as well.
Benefits:
- Share security responsibilities
- Automate compliance
- Mitigate risk
Reliable:
At this point, healthcare organizations are comfortably using cloud services and start focusing on performance optimization. This includes enhancing the efficiency of cloud resources, improving the speed and reliability of cloud-based services, and leveraging cloud capabilities to support healthcare operations more effectively, with automated high availability and disaster recovery in place. Performance metrics are established to measure the effectiveness of cloud usage. This directly translates to increased customer satisfaction and reputation improvement.
Benefits:
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Boost productivity
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Improve care delivery
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Increase customer satisfaction
Optimized: Up to this part of the Cloud Value Journey, the benefits from cloud adoption are primarily tactical. Reaching the Optimized Cloud milestone opens up possibilities for strategic initiatives that can grow the business and drive new revenue streams. The organization has the agility, cost economies, and operational efficiency to free up capital for additional projects.
Benefits:
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Shorten time to value
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Retarget capital investments
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Accelerate innovation
Transformed: The destination of the Cloud Value Journey is the Transformed milestone, which puts the organization in the highest echelon of cloud maturity. The investment in cloud technology drives excellence across the board and leads to recognition by peers, analysts, press, and public. At this stage, the infrastructure essentially disappears from executive management’s radar screen, delivering unprecedented business agility and time to value that empowers top talent to think more strategically and try new things, like developing new cloud-based healthcare models, using big data analytics for advanced patient care, and integrating cloud services with other emerging technologies to offer cutting-edge healthcare solutions. At this stage, cloud value permeates across the business units to HR, Marketing, the clinic, and Sales.
Benefits:
- Enhanced competitiveness
- Attract top talent
- Expand geographically
Overall, the Cloud Value Journey framework provides a structured path for healthcare organizations to effectively adopt and maximize the benefits of cloud computing, ensuring compliance, performance, cost-effectiveness, and innovation.
Mapping out your path to success
Many healthcare organizations began to explore the cloud as a way to reduce costs or enhance scalability. But today they are beginning to see the cloud as a means to achieve additional, higher-level business outcomes—such as improving care, boosting revenue, and increasing competitiveness.
Cloudticity has the experience and expertise to guide you through the stages of your cloud journey, achieving increasingly higher-level outcomes. Whether your company is just getting started in the cloud or whether you're well on your way, having a map to your destination can help you achieve your goals. Understanding where you stand on the framework will enable you to identify the opportunities in front of you. To learn more about the Cloud Value Journey model, download the full white paper here. Or schedule a free consultation to learn how we can work together to turn your healthcare cloud dreams into reality.
