Health executives expect to increase the number of cloud use cases, according to a survey conducted by Healthcare outfit Redox and Sage Growth Partners.
The survey of executives and technology decision-makers from over 100 large academic medical centres and multi-hospital health systems uncovered strategic cloud investment priorities for large healthcare organisations, including current and future use cases and desired business outcomes for cloud technology.
Findings are published in their new report Uncovering hidden data roadblocks of Cloud and AI Adoption in healthcare.
The report said that improved data security and reduced costs are expectations for cloud adoption, executives expect to see a sharp increase in use cases for enhanced product innovation, improved patient engagement and retention, and improved diagnosis and treatment in the near future.
When evaluating future use cases, 97 per cent of provider executives stated that ingesting real-time clinical data is crucial to their enablement – but only three per cent haven’t encountered any challenges when attempting to ingest clinical data into the cloud.
All major cloud clinical data repositories store data in the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard, making it easier to build and connect to an ecosystem of analytics, AI, and apps. However – most legacy systems do not yet use FHIR, requiring organizations to transform data from multiple legacy systems into FHIR to prepare for cloud ingestion. As a result, these projects can become mired in technical complexity, leading to delayed implementation and a critical lack of understanding of clinical workflows.
Survey respondents shared that their top three challenges to execute on cloud ingestion projects are:
• Human capital (68 per cent) – lack of in-house expertise and/or human resources to map legacy standards to FHIR and maintain integrations
• Financial capital (52 per cent) – lack of budget for data translation and ingestion
• Technical capital (44 per cent) – lack of technology to facilitate translation and ingestion at scale
These barriers collectively add up to one overarching challenge – significantly delayed time to value.
Cloud ingestion projects can often be slow and painful to execute, with 40 per cent taking longer than initially budgeted. 86% of cloud integration projects take longer than six months to complete, while 34 per cent take longer than 12 months, the report said.
Redox VP of Strategic Partnerships Devin Soelberg said clinical data ingestion is critical to enabling cloud projects, and the complexity of translating legacy data from multiple sources into FHIR is a barrier that many organizations don’t anticipate.
“The survey results illuminate the nuanced challenges that result when undergoing these projects. This report serves to surface those challenges so that these organizations are well-prepared and don’t waste scarce time, budget, and human resources,” he said,
