Cloud computing is an emerging and fast-growing technology in the field of healthcare industries. It provides a connected, accessible, and collaborative environment for all the stakeholders of the healthcare system. In the present time, health organizations are focusing towards increasing the quality of patient care or health information systems through digitalization. Despite several risks in implementation, compliance, availability, security, etc., cloud computing plays a major role in healthcare due to high storage capability, scalability, collaboration, and most importantly, provisioning of information when required without any delay. The performance of the healthcare system always depends on accessibility, sharing, storage, processing, and analysis of data. This chapter identifies the state of the research and identifies the established framework. This chapter addresses the different challenges and opportunities of adopting a cloud environment as well as related issues like privacy, security, and accountability.
Top1. Introduction
The cloud computing environment in the healthcare industries makes easier and safer sharing of medical records, automates the backend operations, and provides the health care data to increase the efficiency health care system. Cloud computing majorly accelerates the health care analysis, automates the data processing and scalability, reduces risk of data loss, and increases the patent data accessibility.
Cloud Computing Application mostly active in different divisions of health care system listed in the Figure 1.
Figure 1. Cloud Computing Applications in Health Care
Top2. Healthcare System
Health care industry has always been underutilized, digitization of health care information system to access the information between department and application have always depended on notes and records. But this wastes a huge amount (in millions) in each year.
Not only the academic researchers but also the software companies heavily invested in the cloud computing environment with some new health care services and information online. The reason is to provide easy access to the information irrespective of the place where it is but there should be the availability of internet facility (Nayak et al., 2019, Nayak et al., 2018).
According to the Precedence Research organization shown in Figure 2., the global cloud market size was calculated as USD 30.5 billion in the year 2021and predicted year wise report till 2030 and estimated around 127 billion.
Figure 2. Healthcare Cloud Computing Market
As the industry is related to health and wellbeing of the patient, the accountability for all the stakeholders is the primary objective. It is vital that the health care professionals of the organization are held accountable to their work and profession. Otherwise, the health and wellbeing of patient as well the stakeholder shall suffer drastically from life-threatening consequences. Improved performance always ensures quality management of all the resources like human, physical and technical resources. The optimum benefit to the stakeholders is always necessary and how to fit into the health care system and its requirement. Cloud computing identifies the connections or relationship between actors of the health care system and estimates the capability of supply and demand information. Improving performance is through compliance with standard and procedure. Health care system focuses on demonstrating and accounting for performance based on services and its result. These can be assessed in terms of several purposes like, controlling misuse of resources, ensuring that resources are implemented under proper standard and procedure, and supporting improved delivery of services through resource management. It is possible to reduce the misuse and overuse or underuse of resources while providing greater optimality in service.
Top3. Cloud-Based Remote Healthcare System
Traditional System: The traditional system introduced to overcome the problem arising due to the limited number of resources available to people. The problem mainly arises in remote places and it cannot be ignored. It is always important to reduce the information gap between people and the lack of resource. Building infrastructure with the concept of the traditional system requires a huge investment not only for the technical resources but also for the infrastructure required for those technical resources.
Figure 3. Traditional Model Used in the Healthcare System