Align your cloud projects with your mission statement
No matter where your health organization is on its journey to the cloud, the key to a successful path is to take a step-by-step approach. Moving to the cloud need not be an all-or-nothing proposition.
As with any technology, gaining the most value from cloud services means linking them to your health organization’s mission. In other words, moving to the cloud is a progressive journey that starts with your mission statement.
A typical mission statement of a health organization includes the following concepts: maximum quality of care; affordable healthcare; patient involvement; lower costs and streamlined operations; and innovation and research.
A mission statement normally focuses on business processes and not immediately on ICT projects. However, once you begin defining specific steps to achieve the mission statement goals, you typically end up with new or changing ICT needs, and cloud services can help you meet many of those needs.
Let us have a look at some of the mission statement items and corresponding ICT needs in more depth:
To improve quality of care, you may want to expand your usage of controlled, closed-loop processes and follow existing accreditation schemes, such as JCI. Toward that end, you could take advantage of cloud-based document management and workflow systems or business analytics. With the cloud, you could enable processes and data insights to be more easily connected and accessible across departments, organizations, and teams.
To improve patient involvement, you may consider a patient portal that enables patients to get more insight into their disease. It might be a resource for patients to find the right health organizations near them. Or, it might offer tools like a medical encyclopedia, or a chat box for asking a specialist questions. Such a portal is typically a growing project as new services are added over time and the cloud can offer the needed elasticity.
To stay competitive through leading-edge innovation and research, you might think about completely new areas, like using predictive analytics and high performance computing for research projects or taking advantage of the Internet of Things to collect data from devices. Especially in these new areas, the cloud can offer capabilities and services beyond the possibilities of a typical on-premises datacenter.
The above are just a few examples of what linking mission-critical priorities to cloud-based business processes could look like.
Why is this important? It helps you identify how the cloud can help you further your mission. The cloud offers many benefits and opportunities. It enables you to implement new systems fast, reduce costs, and take advantage of the scalability of virtually unlimited resources for storage and computing power. Plus, it offers new capabilities so you can innovate and lead in the health industry. For example, you can connect publicly available big data with your own internal data to uncover new insights. The cloud offers new and exciting ways for you to achieve your goals.
We’ll be sharing more information in the coming weeks about how to build your own unique roadmap for taking a step-by-step approach to the cloud, so stay tuned. And if you have any questions or feedback, of if you’d like help with your journey to the cloud, please reach out via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
