The Google Cloud Healthcare and Life Sciences team spoke with Michael Ames, Senior Director for Healthcare and Life Sciences at SADA, about helping healthcare organizations navigate their transition to the cloud with greater speed and simplicity. Here’s what he had to say:
To start off, how does SADA help healthcare organizations transition to the cloud?
Michael Ames: In many ways, the greatest challenge for healthcare companies right now is just taking those first steps onto the cloud. They’ve seen other industries take advantage of the benefits for quite a while, but in an environment of low margins and high regulatory pressure, it’s difficult for healthcare companies to navigate the investments of time, energy, or capital to take those first steps. Whatever their needs, we’re developing products and services to help healthcare clients of all sizes take those initial steps and launch onto Google Cloud quickly, easily, and at low risk. SADA is now 100 percent focused on products and services built on Google Cloud Platform, and we operate day by day, hour by hour, in lockstep with the Google Cloud team, whether it be sales, marketing, product development, services, or support. We know them and they know us, which enables us to provide a next-level quality of services and products to the community.
That’s right, SADA switched its business to an exclusive Google Cloud focus about a year ago. Why did you choose to partner with Google Cloud?
Michael Ames: SADA has been a Google Cloud Premier Partner for over a decade. We’ve seen Google’s innovation in developing enterprise-grade solutions across the entire Google Cloud portfolio of products. Given we wee one of the first 10 launch partners for Google Cloud, it made sense for us to go all-in and expand our practice and services. We evaluated leading cloud providers, and it was clear to us from the outset that Google Cloud offered the most modern and progressive approach to cloud computing, with solutions particularly suitable for healthcare, not only because of their power, but also because of their simplicity.
Anything that you’d want to accomplish on the public cloud can probably happen more simply and more directly on Google Cloud Platform. In an industry that suffers from a lot of complex environmental pressures, anything we can do to simplify their lives or get them to solutions faster is a major benefit.
How are you tailoring Google Cloud technology to the healthcare space?
Michael Ames: I spend a lot of time in healthcare CIOs’ offices. Some of them are deeply concerned about improving collaboration among their teams; G Suite is a great option for them. Some CIOs are concerned about their digital medicine innovation initiatives, and we talk about things like Kubernetes and Apigee and the back-end systems to help their organizations run really advanced, scalable mobile applications. And others know that they are sitting on piles of valuable data, but they’re not sure how to unlock it. We talk to them about Google’s capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which no other cloud provider can match. What differentiates Google Cloud is that it enables us to bring forward a broad range of solutions that healthcare clients can implement in a simple and achievable way.
SADA is fortunate to work with some of the biggest and most innovative healthcare organizations out there. Organizations like Hackensack Meridian Health, CHS, SCL Health, and Lahey Health are fortunate to have forward-thinking leaders who want to improve the lives of both their workforce and their patients. In many cases, we have worked to convert the workstation inventory of these organizations from traditional Windows and Mac machines to Chrome OS, which gives them increased control over those endpoints, greatly improves security, and reduces costs.
In some cases we’ve been able to extend the lives of existing hardware by many years, which saves them money while still providing a more modern experience for their workforce.
Research shows that a more positive, less frictional workday experience improves the way doctors, nurses, and administrative staff treat patients. So by improving healthcare workers’ experiences through Google Cloud technology, we’re actually having an impact on human health at the point of care.
That’s an amazing perspective. What element of your partnership with Google Cloud contributes most to meaningful impact on human health?
Michael Ames: The tremendous alignment that we see among Google Cloud’s technology stack, the needs of the healthcare community, and the services that SADA can provide is exciting. It’s absolutely clear, particularly under Google Cloud’s leadership in the last couple of years, that they care deeply about the healthcare space and are working hard to bring forward products and technologies that will meet those needs. As a Google Cloud Premier Partner, SADA continually expands services and expertise to help our healthcare clients easily access Google Cloud’s products and technologies. It’s an ecosystem where all the arrows point in the same direction. We all want to improve patient care, we all want to improve clinician experiences, and we all want to protect patient privacy. The development of the Google Cloud technologies, the development of the SADA services, and the demands of the market are all lining up together, and that’s a really exciting place to be.
