Emerging Issues in Healthcare - Developing Biomedical Devices: Design, Innovation and Protection - page 11

with them, reducing administrative costs by 24 %, informed decision making any-
where anytime, improve education amongst patients and students. Indeed, 94 %
of healthcare providers believe mobile apps have the potential to improve care
delivery and 60 % use mobile healthcare apps for work. Finally, according to some
healthcare professionals, the smartphone and tablet are tending to be the most pop-
ular devices since the stethoscope.
m-Health and Telemedicine concepts rely on the medical information
exchange anytime anywhere. In the last five years the same concept has been
exploited by the so-called “Cloud Computing” [ 2 ]. Cloud Computing is a tech-
nology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and
applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applica-
tions without installing them and to access their personal files from any computer
with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing
by centralizing data storage, processing and band-width. An immediate field of
application of this methodology and technology is obviously healthcare [ 3 , 4 ].
Making Cloud services available to health and life science organizations is a dra-
matic step beyond email and communications, meetings and collaboration. They
encompass a broad range of possibilities that can help you meet your organiza-
tional and ICT goals: online health and wellness tools, application development,
data and image storage and sharing. Data security and patient privacy, of course,
are fundamental requirements to provide reliable, secure, and cost-effective
infrastructure and platform services, enabling the deployment of health science
solutions and applications that typically require high availability, scalable expan-
sion, and high performance. All Cloud Computing providers are tackling these
issues and are now offering such kind of solution [ 5 - 7 ]. As they seek ways to
optimize their technology foundation to help control costs and improve access
to information, tools, and resources, health and life science organizations, both
public and private, are exploring the promise of cloud computing services.
Combining security and reliability with a flexible range of deployment options,
cloud computing offers benefits that can make it a compelling choice for your
organization. This allows new services to be built by health organizations to
serve their patients and partners, and at the same time cloud computing provides
a way to reduce costs, simplify management, and improve services in a safe and
secure manner.
As a society, we're living longer and better than at any time in history. In part,
this is due to pharmacological advances. Death rates are down, long-term disabil-
ity is down, life expectancy is higher than ever, and we're making progress against
the most serious diseases we face. As we consider the direction health care will
take in the future, one thing is certain: new, innovative medicines will assume an
increasingly prominent role in the way we improve the quality of care for future
generations.
One critical role of new medicines will be the prevention, treatment, and man-
agement of many diseases suffered by an aging Baby Boomer generation. In the
year 2000, there were roughly 35.6 million Americans aged 65 and older. By
2030, this number is projected to double to an estimated 71.5 million. Diseases