Cloud storage and computing have many advantages for healthcare system operations, but a successful migration to the cloud requires an understanding of the possible pitfalls. Data quality is key to success. Having an hMDM system in place for identity before you complete your migration will significantly increase the value of your cloud services.
Moving to the cloud
Everyone, both in and outside of the healthcare industry, seems to be moving their data storage and computing to the cloud.
Moving to the cloud just means that you store your data and do your processing on remote servers, not somewhere in your building. Storage and processing are distributed and so can respond to changing demands, and the cloud provides the vast amount of storage required for backups and data recovery.
Advantages of cloud storage and processing for healthcare
Aside from business continuity and disaster recovery, cost and speed are the two big reasons for moving to the cloud. With storage and processing provided as a service, costs can be controlled, and a lot of the overhead of acquiring, maintaining, and updating hardware and software is eliminated.
These characteristics make cloud computing ideal for running the full range of workloads, from day-to-day data tasks to generative AI models.
For example, the processing capacity required for occasional resource-intensive calculations, such as year-end financial reporting or flu-season utilization forecasting can be rented as needed, rather than sitting around underused for most of the year.
Pitfalls on the way to cloud operations
But those cost savings and speed increases can take quite a while to show up. You will need to be extremely careful with resource optimization to reach your goals. Costs can escalate if your assessment is off and your operations require unanticipated resources. And, since the storage and processing are remote, you will need to factor in the cost of sufficient bandwidth to avoid any delays in getting needed information.
Moving to the cloud does not eliminate the need to manage your data, understand your analytics, maintain privacy, and integrate incompatible data. Most of the headaches of interoperability will remain.
Specific issues around cloud migration
Healthcare systems have specific issues that make cloud migration difficult, including legacy systems, extensive interdependencies, and immense data volumes.
Healthcare operations often rely on legacy systems, including picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), laboratory information systems (LIMS), and billing and financial systems, typically heavily customized. Sometimes switching to an entirely different system makes more sense than trying to move a legacy system to the cloud. An imminent cloud migration often stimulates long-avoided system changes.
Healthcare system processes also tend to have many interdependencies, where one system depends on data from another. These have evolved over time, and have specific processes and procedures surrounding them. Migrating one of these systems without the other could break significant connections.
And, of course, healthcare systems have a vast amount of sensitive data. Migrating all this data to the cloud needs to be done securely and can take months, even with good bandwidth—and good data.
Data quality is the biggest requirement for successful cloud migration
You don’t want to migrate all of your current data problems to the cloud. Not only will this cause additional difficulties and delays during the migration itself, but with all the attention being directed to acute problems occurring after migration, recurrent healthcare data issues may end up waiting even longer for resolution.
A planned cloud migration is an excellent opportunity to leave long-time data problems behind. Whether you’ll be using a data warehouse, data lake, data fabric, or data mesh to perform analytics and make significant business and clinical decisions, data quality is essential. The biggest source of healthcare data problems is the lack of complete and trusted identity for each person, whether a patient, a provider, a vendor, or a community member.
Data quality relies on identity management
Cloud migration can only succeed with a complete and accurate data set for each person, even if some of that data currently lives fragmented in siloed systems. A trusted identity solution ensures that, when the data is migrated, there are no duplicate identities, and every piece of data that involves a specific person is accurately connected to that person.
The best method of ensuring that identity connection combines an enterprise master patient index (EMPI) with master data management (MDM) for a complete healthcare-focused MDM solution: hMDM. This identifies patients, reduces duplicate records, and ensures that all care, services, and communications, including relevant marketing messages, are delivered to the person who is the correct target.
This identity management guarantees that organizations truly know their patients, staff, and providers completely. It results in clear, unambiguous clinical, financial, and social data supporting sophisticated data analytics. The data you migrate to the cloud will be clean, unambiguous information linked together by identity.
A successful cloud migration depends on reliable identity management
Data quality and identity management should be top-of-mind goals for every healthcare system even without considering the cloud. A planned cloud migration makes them essential. Failing to address these problems before migration will significantly reduce the value of future cloud services.
