The ability to adapt has proven paramount over the past few years and it is fundamentally reshaping healthcare IT. In 2023, that shape will increasingly form around the cloud.

The hogwash started in The Wall Street Journal with a contrarian take on a recent KPMG technology report. But cloud operates in a fundamentally different paradigm from the IT infrastructure of the past, and embracing big change is rarely free or easy. But the rewards of evolving are obvious and far too great to ignore.

Cloud resources are now incredibly varied and accessible, with a large ecosystem of industry-specific cloud-based managed services specializing in these complexities. Which means the average healthcare organization can, indeed, afford to tap into supercloud power — they just get it as a service.

Working on unthinkably large datasets and integrating them with massive amounts of computing power, unleashing millions of trained machine-learning models to inform clinical decision making in real time that factor in all of these elements that make up a person — this will enable significantly better clinical outcomes.

The deadline for ONC’s final rule on interoperability and information blocking is upon us. The time is past due for health providers, networks, and vendors to evolve their IT infrastructure — and the cloud really is the only way forward.

To achieve the technological agility required to function in the modern world, healthcare organizations are wise to pursue managed services and utilize the power of cloud service providers.