Solving Together: Improving Operational Efficiency in Healthcare

The world is slowly beginning to recover from the global impact of COVID-19, but the healthcare industry has many challenges ahead. Healthcare costs are rising and organizations are increasingly hard-pressed to deliver value for patients, while at the same time staying on top of tech. And the need to innovate places enormous pressure on organizations beyond just ‘keeping the lights on.’ 

There are several key IT challenges in the context of healthcare. What IT administrators need is a simple and elegant way to manage their virtual environments and streamline common workflows within a datacenter. The end goal? To simplify management and deployment with minimal disruption to workflow. 

Lending a Helping Hand 

Covid swept the globe and pushed telemedicine forward by a decade if not more. The pandemic has placed immense pressure on emergency rooms and clinics, highlighting the need for scaling up infrastructure and new care models.

Google Cloud solutions help securely harness the power of healthcare data. We have tools that keep patients and providers safe and productive, and our products assist researchers with understanding disease.

Below are three Google Cloud tools and solutions that can help hospital and healthcare organizations face the operational challenges being felt today.

Adopt tools for agility and IT cost reduction 

In times of uncertainty, we are aiming to have in place architecture that gives companies the agility and flexibility to help weather change — or even take advantage of it. New container-based “cloud-native” tools and services have emerged to serve this need. These solutions can help you get started without any infrastructure change so you can develop, secure, and manage apps at scale across their growing hybrid cloud environments. 

Modernize your data warehouse for scalability and access to advanced analytics

Digital transformation has advanced so quickly thanks to COVID-19. Having electronic health records is one of the fundamental stepping stones to transformative healthcare. Data warehouse modernization allows you to solve for today's growing analytics needs by increasing agility and efficiency with serverless analytics — all at a lower cost. 

Cloud data warehouses such as BigQuery will help you make smarter, informed decisions and improve business operations. And the rest of Google Cloud’s smart analytics platform makes it easy to ingest data from various sources in the most cost efficient way for your business— also providing easy access to advanced analytics through AI and machine learning.

Transforming the way teams work together 

Migrating to the cloud is only one part of operational efficiency; teams also need tools that allow them to collaborate seamlessly and work from anywhere. But keeping teams connected and productive outside the office has never been more challenging than it is right now. 

G Suite is a complete, cloud-based productivity solution that includes video meetings, group chat, and document collaboration apps ?— making it possible for organizations to shift entire workforces to remote work quickly. 

To support businesses in this unprecedented time, we made advanced features in Google Meet, our premium video meeting solution, available to all G Suite customers for free until October so businesses can host meetings with up to 250 participants, record them for later viewing, or livestream to up to 100,000 people within a domain. 

Local success

The DNA do Brasil project was created in order to sequence the genomes of thousands of Brazilians in an attempt to signal and identify the unique characteristics present in the country's diverse population. The goal of the study is to trace the genetic origins of the country and begin a study of disease mapping and predispositions. 

Google Cloud helped teams process and store the first batch of 3,000 genomes in the cloud, reducing infrastructure costs by 90%. The project now seeks to process and store an additional 12,000 genomes. 

Hospital San Vicente Fundacion is a non-profit organization that provides medical assistance to low-income communities. Using G Suite, San Vicente Fundación has managed to streamline many processes and become a more modern medical institution, allowing it to offer the quality care by which it’s characterized.

And with Hangouts, the organization created virtual seminars for 1,600 participants, a marked difference compared to the face-to-face conferences in auditoriums that held only 400 people. And collaborative work improved significantly by unifying communication tools like Hangouts and Gmail.

Portal Telemedicina is a Brazilian healthcare technology diagnostics platform that lets doctors issue reports virtually to clinics and hospitals across Brazil in realtime. The partnership with Google Cloud was a huge help to the company and Brazil throughout Covid-19. 

Using Google Cloud technology, Portal Telemedicina was able to serve millions of patients from 500 healthcare facilities in more than 300 cities throughout the country. Throughout the pandemic, the company increased Covid-19 testing, creating 10-minute tests with up to 95% accuracy, and created apps that connected patients to a network of 2,500 doctors. 

Solving Together 

While there are a vast number of benefits to moving to the cloud, every business will have its own unique needs and considerations, which is why it’s critical to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the options at your disposal. Let’s solve for operational efficiency today so we can help secure your growth tomorrow.