The pandemic has disrupted many lives, businesses, and the micro and macro economies. Healthcare is one of the sectors that has seen maximum impact. Some of the key trends in this sector are driven by emerging technologies and enabled by cloud.
Take telehealth, for example. The virtual emergency care provided remotely in the past year is expected to accelerate its adoption. Telehealth has improved accessibility to world-class healthcare and providers are gearing up to enhance their services holistically through robust virtual health management systems rather than standalone remote consultations. They need to enhance the efficiency of their operational capabilities such as financial and administrative operations, data sharing and reporting, transparent contracts and efficient reconciliation. Besides, the contracts of healthcare payers have to be integrated. As telehealth integrates with mainstream, popularity of wearables – and using vital data from these gadgets to remotely monitor patient health – will pick up momentum as well. E-pharmacies and on-demand diagnostics have emerged as key players in the healthcare ecosystem.
With the desperate need for vaccines, rapid, decentralized and patient-centric clinical trials are a reality today. These trends have been made possible largely thanks to the sophisticated digital technologies such as cloud, data and analytics, and cognitive computing.
- Internet of things
Digital transformation of the drug and medical equipment supply chain leveraging IoT and AI-ML has improved efficiency of last mile delivery. It has contributed significantly to the availability of vaccines. IoT also plays a key role in enabling seamless sharing and synchronization of data generated by the wearables and other healthcare equipment.
- Cognitive computing
Real-time and highly scalable predictive models form the basis of cognitive computing in the life science industry. Cognitive systems can hasten scientific discoveries, transform clinical trials and improve execution and engagement for better care. From aiding drug discovery to personalizing medication, ML can play a significant role in the pharmaceutical segment as well.
- Data, analytics, and AI
Data, analytics, and AI are playing a crucial role in translational bioinformatics. Translational bioinformatics integrates molecular data including DNA and RNA sequences, protein and metabolite content with clinical data such as symptoms, diagnostic test data and reports. This has a critical role in studying and predicting emerging variants of pathogens and combating them with suitable drugs.
Cloud enables digitalization of the healthcare ecosystem
Legacy and on-premise infrastructure struggle to meet the massive computing needs and technology demands of the burgeoning healthcare ecosystem. Cloud brings in the necessary performance power and robust security and privacy controls required to operate in this highly regulated healthcare industry. Through APIs, cloud facilitates data interoperability and ecosystem wide collaboration, which is of utmost importance now as global healthcare ecosystems need to collaborate more and more to fight the current pandemic as well as gear up to face similar situations in the future.
Going forward technology emancipation across the healthcare ecosystem will bring about the much sought-after patient-centric accessibility, affordability and sustainability. Organizations stand to gain a faster pace of innovation, harness data potential and personalize the healthcare journey of customers through the life science and healthcare solutions offered on AWS cloud.
AWS has emerged as the trusted technology partner for global players in the healthcare and life sciences industry. As one of the most mature and reliable cloud platforms, AWS provides enterprises the necessary security and privacy guardrails to operate in these highly regulated industries. Enterprises gain an opportunity to modernize every aspect of the pharma value chain, with solutions to help enterprises swiftly develop, test, manufacture, and monetize products and services.
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