Healthcare Cloud Leaders See Better Return on Investment

Healthcare providers that have invested more time and resources into migration, modernization, and cloud-native applications are seeing higher return on investment than those with less mature cloud development and strategy, according to consultancy firm Wipro.

While that might seem like an obvious statement, the underlying message in Wipro’s Healthcare Providers Cloud Report is that for businesses looking at migration or at modernizing parts of their tech stack, a defined strategy, buy-in from C-suite executives, and better understanding of data quality, control, and governance can lead to more cost effective and productive cloud deployments. 

See Also: NHS AI Deployment Improves Stroke Recovery

In a survey of 110 healthcare providers located in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, which is part of a larger research survey into how several industries are handling cloud deployment post-Covid, Wipro found that healthcare ranks highest for divergence in cloud maturity, with 38 percent of those surveyed considered beginners and 20 percent considered cloud leaders. The rest were labeled as intermediate cloud users. 

Healthcare providers with a mature cloud strategy achieved 6.5 percent revenue gain from cloud use, in comparison to 2.7 percent for beginners and 4.2 percent for intermediate users. 

Discussing the Covid-19 pandemic, Wipro found that 68 percent of cloud leaders had increased the priority of cloud to provide resilience, while 50 percent increased cloud investments during 2020 and 2021. About 36 percent of cloud leaders are utilizing a cloud-based data center, in comparison to only 10 percent of non-leaders in the healthcare industry. In the next two years, 86 percent of leaders expect to have moved to a cloud-based data center, with a further 59 percent expecting to be cloud-native when it comes to app development. 

“Moving to cloud enables organizations to transfer healthcare data from older, siloed legacy systems with data formats that don’t “talk” to each other into a more usable, shareable form,” said Mohd Haque, senior vice president and sector head of healthcare and medical devices at Wipro. “To manage data more effectively, leaders and other healthcare providers are transitioning from using primarily public and private cloud to hybrid cloud environments. This allows them to operate databases with sensitive data on the premises and run applications that require more flexible resources in the public cloud.”

As cloud leaders are further ahead in their cloud migration, some are already investing in emerging technologies, which will bring more competitive advantages. Internet of Things technologies are the technology of choice for cloud leaders in healthcare, with 77 percent of respondents pairing them with the cloud, while non-leaders are more invested in data warehousing and artificial intelligence, although in both categories a higher percentage of cloud leaders are investing in these technologies. Robotic process automation (RPA), which is seeing a lot of adoption in fields with monotonous work flows, has the lowest amount of interest of all six advanced technologies, with less than half pairing it with the cloud. 

Some of the main ways healthcare providers are seeing revenue improvements through cloud are by growing revenue through productivity, faster time to market, and improved market positioning. Some of the main benefits of cloud return on investment were decreased IT costs, improved decision making, and increases in revenue.