When traveling and meeting healthcare professionals and politicians from all over the world it’s striking that, regardless of the different socio-economic structures, they are all struggling to improve their healthcare sector.

Inefficiency has grown in recent years. We now see longer waiting times to treatment and a lack of access to patient histories. At the same time, ageing populations and the rise of chronic diseases, combined with increased patient demands and stricter financial expectations are pulling the strings even tighter.

We need to create healthcare systems that offer high-quality treatments and empower patients without straining resources. Cost, quality and access: this may sound like an impossible equation to balance, but it is not.

Digital capabilities can transform the healthcare sector. When meeting our customers and UK governmental officials recently in London, speakers noted that one of the biggest opportunities driving technology today is the combination of analytical data and physical data, and that in the next five years the connection between machines and data is going to be profound.
Cloud computing represents a mean to accelerate this transformation: GE recently announced the GE Health Cloud, a new ecosystem for the healthcare industry that will connect clinicians across care pathways and multidisciplinary teams.

Olivier Croly, Vice President and General Manager, GE Healthcare IT, Europe

We are now in a situation where hospitals generate tremendous amounts of data, but that data needs to be managed in a way that is beneficial to patients and helps lead to faster diagnoses and treatments. Todd McNitt, who leads Cloud Development at GE Healthcare IT, pointed out.

By using cloud technology, clinicians, patients and specialists can share and access data easily and securely from anywhere. It will provide an appealing user experience and is fully equipped with security measures that are critical to the healthcare industry. Perhaps most importantly, the cloud offers powerful analytics, far beyond what any individual computer can provide. This has the potential to lead to faster, more insightful diagnoses and insights to improve both care and efficiency.

We are starting an exciting journey that has all the potential to change the healthcare sector for the better. To fully realize this opportunity we need wide participation and collaboration across healthcare and business sectors.