The opinions expressed by contributors are of their own.
It seems like just a few years ago the cloud was threatening to disrupt everything about how we lived our lives, but now it's quickly becoming commoditized. Customers pay for what they need, and the prices for most of the larger companies are the same.
The concept of the cloud is shifting because of the lack of meaningful differentiation between cloud service providers. It's not enough for cloud providers to have a new capability or better availability. Half dozen top players have almost the same offerings. If cloud service is not a disruptive technology anymore, what is the next big play?
A single patient may have dozens of transactions associated with their care at every care encounter in the healthcare industry. There is a very complex requirement where lives are on the line. Legacy, cumbersome systems that healthcare providers license to use have been the solutions until now.
One of the main issues with these systems is that they don't play nicely with the cloud. Although a platform may work on Amazon Web Services, it is not ideally built for it. The healthcare system is unwieldy because it uses different systems that are housed on cloud platforms. The cloud creates a false sense of modernization by moving legacy systems from data centers to the cloud.
This adds up to a lot of money. Billions of dollars are spent each year by healthcare companies to license these systems. The cloud service providers can provide ancillary capabilities, but they can't provide the core transactional needs. To meet these needs, healthcare companies need to pay for new services or translate legacy systems to new systems.
This may sound like a huge problem, but it's actually an opportunity for tech companies to solve it.
Everyone's responsibility is related to the data-driven future of healthcare.
The software is a service model.
What is the solution to a legacy system where healthcare providers have to piece together disparate transactional platforms? It might not be easy, but it starts with a software as a service model. None of the big cloud providers have focused on providing a platform for payers and pharmacy benefit managers to manage the huge amount of transactions they process.
The means to an end are what the cloud infrastructure is about. Providing mission-critical software as a service could help healthcare companies manage their transactions while at the same time opening up new revenue streams that are virtually unexplored at the moment. If vendors could provide mission-critical functions like operational, financial, risk, and compliance transactions using such advances as robotic process automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, they could significantly reduce operational costs and avoidable medical costs. It's a win.
Next-Generation caregivers meet new technology.
Building platforms across providers.
The healthcare industry's current problem is a potential goldmine for high-tech companies. The cloud market has an incredible opportunity for differentiation. Billions of dollars are spent on managing transactions across disconnected platforms in the $4 trillion healthcare industry.
It's important to build a service that can be hosted on the cloud. Vendors need to develop platforms on cloud-native architecture that are portable enough to be hosted on any cloud platform with minimal changes while also being able to take full advantage of the public cloud infrastructure. Since cloud services are undifferentiated, transactional platforms need to be able to operate on them. The industry desperately needs the first platform provider to provide such a platform.
The future of healthcare is in the cloud.
