Cloud computing is one of the most modern-day revolutionary technologies all over the world. Most organizations today are the use of cloud computing in their daily activities, the healthcare industry included. Cloud computing evolution in healthcare is taking place rapidly in the contemporary world, and with time, the healthcare services can lay more focus on providing not only efficient but also cost-effective healthcare services to individuals from all over the globe. There are different ways in which cloud computing can be used to improve the healthcare sector. However, concerns might arise, which would require to be addressed.
There are different ways in which cloud computing provides value to the healthcare sector. First, the use of cloud computing helps to ensure that there is the mobility of records. In some instances, healthcare facilities need an individual's healthcare information to provide to other healthcare facilities where a patient can be referred to. In such a case, a healthcare facility that has implemented cloud technology can easily synchronize the client's healthcare information and share it with the relevant facility immediately. Consequently, this enables physicians to deliver better and efficient healthcare to the patients. However, in reference to Miranda (2017), most hospitals believe that cloud means the software as a service (SaaS) as a majority of them want to utilize off-the-shelf products. There is thus a gap of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in most healthcare organizations implying that cloud computing is in an insufficient state.
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Cloud computing also helps a healthcare facility reduce its costs as most medical organizations that use cloud techniques save on costs to a great extent. The cloud computing providers usually ensure that they handle maintenance and infrastructure, thus reducing the need for healthcare organizations to invest huge amounts of money on this maintenance. A recent report from the Healthcare Financial Management states that dependent on the scope and the size of a healthcare facility, the savings which are achieved by utilizing the electronic health record is likely to amount to $37 million over a period of five years ( Darwish et al., 2017) . The healthcare facility can thus work on investing these savings in a different area of the organization. The cost reduction benefit has rendered a larger number of healthcare organizations to invest in cloud computing over time since technology advancement has also helped to decrease the funds needed to implement it.
Although cloud computing healthcare has its values, there are several concerns that come with applying cloud computing. One of the biggest setbacks in healthcare adoption of cloud computing is privacy issues as a result of the risks associated. The data of a patient is innately sensitive, and thus the data of a healthcare facility that is cloud-hosted need safeguarding against any possible external threats (Miranda et al., 2017) . This will be meant to prevent misuse and the disclosure of information. There are also global concerns that are related to security, data privacy, and jurisdiction, and compliance, all of which hugely impact the cloud technology adoption by healthcare industries. This issue can be combated by a healthcare organization through encrypting their data, the use of security keys while accessing sensitive information, and the use of blockchain for data security. This way, the healthcare organization can ascertain that the data of their patients are safely stored in the cloud.
Another concern of clod adoption in healthcare is the concern on the ability to change their cloud vendor or transitioning back to the healthcare organization without the interruption of its operations of the emergence of conflicting claims their data (Gao et al., 2018) . Therefore, if a provider decided to suspend its services or deny healthcare access to data, the organization might be unable to offer the required healthcare services to its customers and patients, thus posing a huge problem. A healthcare organization can solve this concern by ensuring that the cloud provider they look for is reliable and can solve related issues if they arise. Also, a healthcare organization should have a backup plan and should be ready with an action to take in case of such an incident.
The examples are client/server architectures. In a healthcare setting, security is key, and this architecture has a centralized security database which helps in controlling the access to servers shared resources. Each user needs to supply the server with their usernames and passwords to access resources that the network administrator lets them access (Yeh, 2016) . Although the client/server model is slightly expensive as compared to the peer-to-peer network, it ensures security is enhanced in a healthcare organization. Healthcare staff can only share the documents which they are allowed to access, and thus only the relevant party can share the information to another referral hospital, which ensures that not everyone can share a patient's information, thus reducing risks related to privacy.
Cloud Computing is widely used in the healthcare industry today to enhance efficiency. The electronic storage of patient records helps to increase patient care productivity while enhancing accessibility and usage. Cloud computing can pose a danger to the security of patient's information if a healthcare facility does not work on protecting these files and only allowing access to the relevant individuals in the facility. The client/server network is the most effective in the security of data and is thus the best to use in a healthcare setting.
References
Darwish, A., Hassanien, A., Elhoseny, M., Sangaiah, A., & Muhammad, K. (2017). The impact of the hybrid platform of the internet of things and cloud computing on healthcare systems: opportunities, challenges, and open problems. Journal Of Ambient Intelligence And Humanized Computing , 10 (10), 4151-4166. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-017-0659-1
Gao, F., Thiebes, S., & Sunyaev, A. (2018). Rethinking the Meaning of Cloud Computing for Health Care: A Taxonomic Perspective and Future Research Directions. Journal Of Medical Internet Research , 20 (7), e10041. https://doi.org/10.2196/10041
Miranda, J., Cabral, J., Banerjee, S., Grossmann, D., Pedersen, C. F., & Wagner, S. R. (2017, September). Analysis of OPC unified architecture for healthcare applications. In 2017 22nd IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA) (pp. 1-4). IEEE.
Yeh, K. (2016). A Secure IoT-Based Healthcare System With Body Sensor Networks. IEEE Access , 4 , 10288-10299. https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2016.2638038
