The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every industry, but none more so than healthcare. Brave frontline workers are the most visible defense against the virus, and hospitals have had to figure out how to do more for patients while severely limiting access to their facilities – thus the rise of telemedicine and the now ubiquitous video doctor visit.
No less important is how healthcare is changing behind the scenes. Thanks to high-performance computing, an accelerated search for treatments is ongoing, and artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and the internet of things (IoT) are vital to new strategies for virus surveillance, diagnosis and patient risk assessments. AI is also helping to power digital assistants, drones and robots that are being used to improve care while reducing risk.
However, these technologies require unprecedented collaboration and data sharing across digital ecosystems, which in turn requires securing huge amounts of data as it flows from the edge to the core, from network to network, from service provider to service provider. As healthcare companies collaborate to create vaccines and treatments to address COVID-19, they must be able to confidently and securely share sensitive data with pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies and government entities around the world.
Vendor-neutral private interconnection solutions like those on Interconnection, or private data exchange between businesses, is the deployment of IT traffic exchange points that integrate direct connections between two entities, creating the safest, most efficient way to exchange information.
Our 210+ Equinix International Business Exchange™ (IBX®) data centers, interconnected physically and virtually across 55+ metros, are also home to rich ecosystems of clouds and enterprises across many sectors. Platform Equinix offers interconnection to 1,800+ network providers and 2,900+ cloud IT providers. This dense ecosystem enables healthcare providers to achieve the internet speed, reliability and security they need for seamless data sharing, telemedicine, remote patient monitoring and other IoT use cases related to data collection and analytics.
To learn more, read “How the COVID-19 pandemic is fast-tracking AI health innovation” and download the Digital Edge Playbook for Healthcare.
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