Patient Care Enhanced with Cloud Services
Amid the surge of COVID-19 cases, the Providence teams developed data analysis tools that gave real-time information on patient volume, hospital staffing levels, and the supply of ventilators and personal protective equipment to 52 hospitals.
They ran predictive analysis through Microsoft Azure to forecast hospitals with spikes in coronavirus cases accurately.
Accelerating cloud adoption during the pandemic enabled them to scale up their infrastructure to support patient care needs and telehealth services.
More than 50 percent of health IT workloads are in the cloud.
Managing and maintaining legacy systems costs up to 64 percent of IT budgets.
Cloud solutions can also help reduce costs, break down data silos and improve data access across an organization or multiple stakeholders.
Real-Time Data Improves Care
Providence partnered with Microsoft in mid-2019 to modernize its IT infrastructure with Azure cloud services.
Early in the pandemic, the organization quickly pivoted to Azure to power daily processing needs.
Providence uses Azure products and services for analytics, machine learning, and Power BI to produce real-time reports on dashboards and prevent hospital overcrowding and equipment shortages in hospitals.
Dashboards allowed frontline caregivers and regional leaders to make critical decisions.
Benefits of AI-Powered Diagnostics
UC San Diego Health in California developed a machine learning algorithm that analyzes chest X-rays and detects pneumonia associated with COVID-19 infections.
The university deployed the machine learning model on Amazon Web Services (AWS) under an approved experimental protocol to diagnose its experts. The algorithm overlays X-rays with color-coded maps that show the probability of pneumonia.
The algorithm has analyzed about 100,000 chest X-rays since last year, near all the chest X-rays performed at UCSD Health.
The benefits of the cloud are scalability and speed of deployment.
So far, the new algorithm has analyzed about 50,000 X-rays as it continues to provide UCSD Health’s doctors and radiologists with analysis.
Hybrid Cloud Makes Data Management Easier
Luminis Health organization began adopting public cloud services two years ago.
The organization is not cloud-first, but its IT leaders say they consider cloud options when upgrading or purchasing new applications.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure saves money because Luminis Health doesn’t have to buy new hardware. By not managing the Oracle environment, IT staff can focus on larger projects that the organization needs to keep on-premises.
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