Is ‘Platform As A Service’ (PaaS) Becoming Healthcare’s Preeminent Cloud Model?

Healthcare Is ‘Platform As A Service’ (PaaS) Becoming Healthcare’s Preeminent Cloud Model? Seth Joseph Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about the intersection of health care, technology and policy Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! Sep 21, 2022, 08:00am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin In the wake of a pandemic that pushed healthcare’s innovation throttle forward tenfold in just two years, healthcare organizations are increasingly leaning on cloud services to meet unanticipated demand for tech advancement in a short period of time.

Research suggests that most healthcare companies favor a hybrid multi-cloud architecture, where the majority of healthcare infrastructures will be moved to the cloud over the next few years. Though there are new “as-a-service” categories being introduced all the time, the three main models of cloud service today are software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS). And in healthcare, PaaS is staking a particularly deep claim and positioned to surpass SaaS as the superior cloud services model, for many reasons.

Typical SaaS healthcare applications include electronic medical records and health records (EMRs/EHRs) , telehealth solutions, imaging, billing and supply chain management, which tend to be disparate, disintegrated systems housing data and solutions operating in silos. On the other hand, PaaS is a unique cloud-services category that lets users run and manage software without having to build or maintain an infrastructure. Cloud computing has come to healthcare.

Now too is the “Platform as a Service” concept getty In healthcare, PaaS enables hospitals and health systems , digital health developers, health plans, and other key stakeholders to more efficiently and effectively execute health IT solutions without having to invest ample time and resources in building a tech foundation to support them – many times, because adequate options already exist. PaaS Is Particularly Well-Suited For Healthcare MORE FOR YOU CDC: Salmonella Outbreak Has Left 279 Ill, 26 Hospitalized In 29 States Canadians End Up In ICU After Attending ‘Covid Party’ White House Mandates Pfizer Vaccines for Millions of Citizens . .

. Before the FDA Clinical or Safety Reviews Have Been Made Public Here are four reasons why PaaS is proving to be the superior data management and application development model for healthcare delivery systems aiming to improve information exchange and create more value for their organizations, patients and other healthcare stakeholders: As opposed to SaaS models of data management, platform as a service (PaaS) is a more comprehensive and open enterprise framework that facilitates integrated and interoperable solutions. In comparison, SaaS are typically point solutions that keep data trapped and healthcare operating in silos.

Platforms are uniquely able to support a unified patient record and patient experience, which is critically important for better information exchange, care coordination, and the shift to value-driven care. PaaS can provide enterprise infrastructure and security for data integration and interoperability of all healthcare data. (For example, a data science platform could run advanced healthcare analytics, common application services to streamline and accelerate solutions development, developer tools for building those solutions, a marketplace of solutions to solve most common high-impact use cases, and bespoke solutions.

) Connect multiple applications and multiple solutions in a united, cohesive workflow that makes sense. SaaS simply solves the pain point of the day and actually increases the data, workflow, and experiential fragmentation in the organization Build vs. Buy decisions: Platforms Accelerating Innovation Rather than build or buy a single-purpose SaaS solution, health systems are increasingly employing platforms to create unified patient data repositories that are integrated, unified, available, analyzable, and actionable as a single source of truth.

And as health systems’ data needs change and evolve, employing platforms provides flexibility, in that organizations are no longer saddled to a particular vendor’s SaaS or data model. For hospitals and health systems trying to navigate the data management landscape and make optimal choices for their organizations, the rise of platforms across industries has taught an important make vs. buy lesson.

Instead of investing ample time and resources into building various layers of a data management system – one for integration, one for data intelligence, one for the middleware, one for interoperability, etc. – invest in researching platforms that already exist and solve those bevy of problems. Looking outside of healthcare, take Uber, for example.

The main value Uber offers its riders is convenience and easy trip management. However, the rideshare company did not build its solution from the ground up. Instead of building a mapping function, they use Google’s location cloud.

For Uber’s SMS texting capability, the company uses Twilio’s communication cloud. By leveraging existing platforms and capabilities, companies like Uber can focus on meeting the needs of their core to consumers as fast as possible, while not having to reinvent the wheel or divert time and resources away from innovating in other areas. The main takeaway here for hospitals is to focus on your organization’s core value proposition and explore how existing platforms can help accelerate and achieve goals related to it.

What you’ll discover is there is an ecosystem of cloud platforms better suited to helping you achieve your core purpose than solutions you could build in-house. Instead of “build it and they will come,” it will be “build it and you will fail” – or at the very least, not be in a position to scale and succeed. Platforms can accelerate innovation, if only you will let them.

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