Latin America health customers leapfrog to modern IT and better patient care
When I meet with health leaders here in Latin America, I always like to ask them: Why would you want a datacenter taking up space, time, and money in your health organization, when the real estate and resources could be used for patient services? What if you could spend less capital on IT, so you could spend more on medical technology such as that new MRI machine you have your eye on? What if you could free up your IT staff from routine infrastructure maintenance, so they could focus more on strategic IT initiatives that help further your organization’s goals?
These are questions I could pose to any health leader across the globe. But in Latin America, it’s even more relevant because the cloud offers health organizations the opportunity to not only save time and money but also leapfrog to modern IT services that can help them provide better patient care.
After all, patient care is the business of health organizations — not running datacenters.
By offloading some of their IT infrastructure, our customers are reducing IT real estate and capital expenditures. With cloud services, they can pay as they go for user licenses and leave the infrastructure costs to us. They don’t have to worry about hardware costs and software upgrades. They can also stop expending time and money on managing services and keeping the tools they depend on up to date.
For these reasons, health organizations everywhere are moving to the cloud. And in Latin America, health organizations don’t have as much historical IT infrastructure to deal with in comparison with their counterparts in more developed regions such as Europe and the U.S. So it’s easier for them to take advantage of the cloud, because there aren’t as many legacy systems to migrate. As a result, we’re seeing Latin American customers use the cloud to swiftly modernize, reduce costs, and provide better patient services. In this way, cloud services are leveling the playing field for health organizations around the world.
Medical imaging data storage, such as radiology data, is often one of the first areas that LATAM health organizations shift to the cloud. The rapid growth in this type of data and the need to archive it for at least 5 to 10 years, depending on country-specific regulations, means that health organizations have been spending significant resources on storage — buying hardware and managing their ever-growing storage infrastructure.
Now, many of our LATAM customers are taking advantage of modern cloud and hybrid cloud solutions to scale data storage at lower costs — and with the right security and redundancy. For example, we recently had several customers in Brazil and Puerto Rico take advantage of StorSimple for their radiology data storage needs. Some are also using third-party solutions based on Azure.
We’re also seeing LATAM health organizations use the cloud for disaster recovery. By replicating their datacenter using Azure cloud services, for example, they’re saving a lot of money because they don’t have to set up and maintain their own fully duplicated disaster recovery site.
These are just a couple of examples of how our LATAM health customers are quickly achieving significant costs savings and leapfrogging to modern IT with the cloud. With their datacenter functions taken care of by trustworthy cloud services from Microsoft and our partners, they’re able to shift more of their focus to taking the best possible care of their patients.
How has the cloud helped you to save money and improve patient care? Let us know via email, Facebook, or Twitter. And please also contact us with any questions or feedback.
