Is the cloud the royal road to digital transformation for hospitals? This is a nuanced view, given the many obstacles and challenges involved in migrating hospital environments to the cloud.
A challenge above all human
Faced with the demands of both operational and financial performance, the health sector can no longer do without digital transformation. To modernise within reasonable timescales and meet the demands of both operational and financial efficiency, the cloud is a powerful lever for healthcare establishments. And the first challenge it can help to meet is not a technological one, but a human one. The constraints to which healthcare professionals are subject today require more services for patients, more responsiveness, more immediacy. For hospital CIOs, the key issue is to improve IT tools to enable practitioners to maximise their time with patients. Put another way: everyone needs to do more with less. The shortage of staff also concerns technical profiles, which have become a scarce resource. In this context, the automation offered by cloud architectures is a valuable asset.
A hybrid environment
However, the "cloud at the centre" approach remains disconnected from the realities of the hospital world. For reasons of resilience or historical legacy, on-premise infrastructures do exist, and they have their place in healthcare environments. This is the case, for example, for imaging services associated with a PACS, or for laboratory analyses, which healthcare establishments want to keep local to ensure they can carry out their mission in all circumstances. These infrastructures are also needed to host niche applications, such as machines running HP-UX, which are impossible to migrate to the cloud. Conversely, administrative functions are good candidates for migration. Today, they represent a significant part of the work of healthcare professionals, managing patient identity, admission, follow-up, exchanges and communication with external players, from the GP to the family.
The best architecture for every need
But not all establishments are on an equal footing when it comes to the cloud: small regional hospitals and groups of establishments in major conurbations have neither the same resources nor the same needs. As a result, the move to the cloud can - and should - take different forms, depending on the sector of activity and the underlying business. To choose the infrastructure that best meets your needs, it's essential to discuss the objectives and expected user benefits with your business professionals. Working with them, it becomes easier to decide which part of the architecture to keep on site, which to migrate to a trusted cloud and which SaaS tools to make available outside the environment. It is essential to enable hospital environments to embark on a digital transformation process at a pace that suits them. Having an automated platform enables healthcare establishments to benefit from a dedicated 100% infrastructure, with a single set of PLCs, and to deploy infrastructure-as-code, a decisive element in the digital transformation effort.
SecNumCloud-qualified security
Then there's security. Because it is open by nature, the hospital environment is an easy target, accessible from the inside and therefore very difficult to secure. That's why it's so important to create a "bubble of trust" on a state-of-the-art security cloud. This is the purpose of the SecNumCloud qualification set up by ANSSI, which guarantees players in the healthcare sector that cloud providers comply with the highest standards of security and sovereignty in France and Europe.
Convinced that health data requires the highest level of trust, French cloud players are mobilising to demand that the new version of the HDS (Health Data Hosting) reference framework, currently being overhauled by the Agence du Numérique en Santé (French Digital Health Agency), be based on SecNumCloud's logical and legal security criteria.
Today, hospitals can access French cloud infrastructures that interconnect with their IT assets and offer absolute guarantees of security and confidentiality for medical data. A trusted French cloud, driving transformation and guaranteeing the resilience of a sector that is more vital than ever.