Business Applications

Healthcare providers will need a wide range of applications; Department Information System, Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), Cardiovascular Information Systems (CVIS), Electronic document management, E-Prescribing – Electronic prescription software, LIMS, and Image Management solutions.

They are also looking to partners to help them re-platform applications, introduce SaaS applications, or to create an API environment to surround legacy applications to allow modern digital platforms to be introduced and remote working to be allowed. Containerisation of legacy applications will be a necessary step in the large-scale migration of workloads to public cloud and allow workloads to shift across a hybrid multi-cloud architecture.

Compute & Cloud

By their very nature digital platforms leverage hyperscale infrastructure from cloud providers in computing, data storage and security to deliver scale, reliability and customer experience. Healthcare Providers have been slow to adopt cloud due to security and compliance concerns, but adoption is now growing fast as the cloud providers have invested heavily in cloud security and healthcare specific compliance measures.

Clouds will form the storage point for healthcare data, allowing for better sharing of information with ecosystem players. Healthcare Providers are recognising they need to skills (or partners) to operate an environment that not only manages the cloud infrastructure but allows the ease of moving workloads to and from different clouds.

Digital Workplace

Healthcare Providers must embed digital tools into the workplace to support clinicians to operate efficiency and collaboratively to improve the patient experience and reduce administrative burdens. With healthcare moving beyond the confines of the hospital or surgery the system also needs to support remote working.

Telehealth is enabling new staffing models, such as allowing clinicians to work remotely, while still building strong patient relationships and having high-value interactions, thus reducing staff burnout and potentially creating more workplace fulfilment. The NHS believes it can drive productivity growth of at least 1.1% per year.

As well as access to critical healthcare application the clinicians also need access to HR applications and business applications such as e-mail, instant messaging and virtual meeting tools. More than two million hours of staff time have been saved since the NHS rolled out Microsoft Teams, a survey has found.

Security, Compliance & Data Privacy

Patients (and regulators) demand that Healthcare Providers operate at a very high level of security and privacy. This includes identity management, data security, privacy management and cybersecurity.  

54% of healthcare organisations hit with cyberattacks in the last year, and faced an average of 109 cyberattacks per week last year, by far the most of any industry. Ransomware attacks have doubled in 2 years. A report from cybersecurity firm Bitglass shows 67% of all healthcare data breaches were the result of malicious hacking or weak IT security.

In 2019, healthcare providers became a primary target of ransomware attacks, a trend which continued into 2020 with the Ryuk ransomware strain. The 2017 WannaCry malware attack hit a third of the UK’s NHS systems. The Netherlands-based European Medicines Agency (EMA) was the subject of a successful cyberattack in January 2021, designed to access information on Pfizer/BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine. The NHS 111 service was hit in August 2022 after a cyber attack on its software provider. Doctors have warned it could take months to process the growing piles of paper medical records caused by the cyber attack. A hacked Kaiser Permanente employee's emails led to breach of 70,000 patient records,

The FT estimates the average cost per capita of a health data breach in 2017 was $380, way more than the $240 for financial data and significantly greater than any other sector. Reuters estimates that medical information is worth 10 times more than credit card information on the black market. United Health Services (UHS) estimates its Ryuk ransomware attack cost it $67 million in 2020. Embedding security into scalable, resilient infrastructure is key.

Concern is being raised that virtual care and remote patient monitoring will become a new attack surface. Many patients are not as tech-savvy as healthcare providers – and might be less vigilant against attacks if they are feeling sick, fatigued or in pain. Threat actors recognise this vulnerability. By hiding malicious code inside the flow of data from patients, attackers hope to initiate ransomware attacks.