Benefits of cloud enabled healthcare in Asia-Pacific

Healthcare across Asia-Pacific is changing, driven by new delivery models, growth in telemedicine, and a step-change in citizen expectations. Technology enables providers to take advantage of this evolving landscape and deliver quality care in an accessible and cost-efficient way. Amazon Web Services (AWS) commissioned this analysis across 9 Asia-Pacific countries – including New Zealand and Australia – to consider how cloud can accelerate the digitisation of health to support greater health equality, increase productivity and improve outcomes for patients.

As the digitisation of the health industry continues to accelerate, so will adoption of cloud technologies that leverage and complement other aspects of digitisation. Cloud technology plays an important role in enabling many different types of technologies by providing on-demand data storage and computing power that enables data intensive applications. It enables national health systems to respond more efficiently to health events, reduces operating costs for health organisations, and delivers improved outcomes for patients.

Healthcare organisations could see substantial reductions in direct operating costs from transitioning to cloud. There could be $31.6 billion USD in cost savings if hospitals across the nine Asia-Pacific countries transitioned to the cloud.

To unlock the potential of cloud in healthcare, technology and digital systems need to be implemented appropriately and effectively across health systems. Despite the significant forecast growth, cloud investment for healthcare is significantly less than other sectors such as finance (worth $8.3 billion USD in 2022 across the nine countries).

Facilitating greater public investment in cloud technology and infrastructure would help realise the benefits identified in the report.