Transforming Care Delivery with New Edge Computing

Executive Summary :

1) Today's healthcare systems must transform to a data-driven, patient-centric model that is more collaborative, distributed, and personalized. The growing demand for affordable quality healthcare drives a smart and connected care continuum where seamless and secure data capture, analysis, and sharing are standard. Digital technology is at last making this transformation possible, and continued advances in compute performance can deliver better clinician and patient experiences.

2) Technology advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics are driving faster, better decision-making through interactions between edge, data center, and cloud. But with request volume and complexity increasing, the cloud alone is no longer enough. The next great leap requires real-time local data management and analytics to reduce response time and network congestion, and provide improved autonomy, reliability, resource utilization, and data coherency.

3) A key element in this shift is a new paradigm—recently dubbed edge computing—which places more compute resources beyond the data center and cloud and closer to the data to enhance care decision-making through greater speed, accuracy, and reliability. Edge computing, driven by the massive explosion in interconnected medical and non-medical devices, enables new applications and services that unlock enormous clinical value but cannot be easily supported by the current host-based and cloud-based application platforms.