BAPTIST HEALTH OF ARKANSAS
Into the clouds In 2018 , the system had little presence in the cloud ; Elley ’ s ambition since undertaking his role has been to expand this dramatically . “ I would venture to say that only 1 % to 2 % of our environment was cloud-based . As we go into 2023 , about a third of it will be , says Elley .
“ Our early move was from on-premise collaboration software into GCP . An 18-month , ongoing project is moving our ERP environments into the cloud . Any new systems , replacements or updates are evaluated for a move to the cloud . We ' re on all the main cloud platforms now , as we deploy any new tech , the first thought is about its appropriateness in the cloud .
“ A priority is value for money . Does it make sense financially , from a support and reliability of performance perspective , to move that to a cloud ? We ' re successfully reducing the amount of on-prem , server and storage needs .
“ Recently , we ' ve been upgrading our Picture Archive Communications System ( PACS ) system for both cardiology and radiology with the help of our partner , Change Healthcare . And now we ' re moving our long-term image archive and backup – in a consistent year-on-year increase for cloud utilisation .”
Maintaining on-premise platforms is expensive and involves a lot of manual work . It ' s hard to predict and plan spending . And then there ' s the matter of hardware , storage , servers , and licensing . Baptist Health is therefore benefitting – not just in efficiency now , but in future costs . Another benefit has been the greater predictability of readmissions , sepsis and many other problems formerly dealt with reactively . Many more financial and cash-flow improvements are in the plan : “ I ’ m keen to bring in AI to help the revenue cycle – for example , pre-authorisations – and I ' m excited about its potential on the clinical side , too . Change Healthcare is helping us greatly to identify and implement these technologies .”
Particularly valuable today are advances in medical imaging technology . If a patient comes in for a CAT scan , we bank up huge numbers of images captured to illuminate a specific issue , but these may cast light on unrelated problems that should also be dealt with . ML can pick these up and bring them to the attention of the Radiologists . This is the kind of thing that really fires up Michael Elley .
There ’ s no limit to where this technology can take patient care . As it improves , it can – while documenting an individual patient – identify similarities with other patients ' scans , relate the data to other clinical indicators and indicate potential problems for other patients at an early stage .
10 baptist-health . com