Hey folks, as the healthcare analyst for the Acceleration Economy, I’m here to share with you a recap of the fantastic week we had out in San Francisco, June 28th-30th 2022 for the Cloud Wars Expo.
Firstly, the event went off without a single hitch. As a speaker, it was exciting to be in person again, be around the various cloud vendors, see the talks, and meet the Acceleration Economy team.
It was an information-packed week where we dived deep into industry cloud, multi-cloud, and everything cloud the C-suite might find useful. The who’s who of the cloud industry and vendors shared their most recent developments as we head into the second half of 2022. Let’s take a look at some of the key highlights of the event from a healthcare industry perspective, including:
- The Metaverse and Remote Hybrid Care
- The Metaverse and Augmented Surgery
- Machine Learning and AI in Healthcare
- Cloud Wars Day
- Oracle
- Microsoft
- Workday
- Last Words about Cloud Wars Expo 2022
Let’s begin!
The Metaverse and Remote Hybrid Care
One of the most fascinating developments has been the work that’s been put into the Metaverse tracking of content, including some really incredible insights around healthcare.
One of the interesting developments was a case study where a hospital was able to drastically reduce the cost of PPE by using these Metaverse technologies to remotely administer hybrid care. This led to a significant impact of up to $700 per provider that was being saved. The simplicity of integration with the Metaverse seems simple on the surface and will certainly lead to better healthcare outcomes in the near future.
The Metaverse and Augmented Surgery
During my Metaverse session, I highlighted a company called apoQlar, another fascinating example of a company involved in using Metaverse technology to augment surgery in a unique way. Oftentimes, when you see augmented surgery, what you’ll see is a visual with the provider using AR/VR goggles to see a schematic of the human body or information that they need during surgery.
But this was different, in that what it was actually doing was projecting the actual patient’s internal organs as the surgery was happening. Again just another fascinating example of the Metaverse in healthcare and an exciting frontier for the future of patient care.
Machine Learning and AI in Healthcare
I believe the second hottest topic of the week was AI. There was just a ton of fascinating talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence across the industry.
First, I gave one of the presentations (“Real AI in Healthcare”), which focused on a wide range of topics. One of the most fascinating topics I covered was centered around this new idea of a hybrid data state, which facilitates both business intelligence and machine learning.
Cloud Wars Day
Cloud Wars Day has turned into one of my favorite parts of the Acceleration Economy and it’s the second one I’ve had the opportunity to participate in.
In short, what happens at Cloud Wars Day is that we invite the largest cloud players — Oracle, Google, Microsoft, Workday — to come in and present on their industry. We gave them five questions ahead of time as well. These questions were designed to make the participants provide greater insights on what developments we can expect with cloud computing in healthcare.
Here’s a brief overview of my thoughts on each cloud player:
Oracle
It’s always amazing to hear from Mike Sicilia from Oracle. He shared with the audience what the company is currently working on in IoT, as well as answered questions about Oracle’s recent acquisition of Cerner, which enabled Oracle to provide end-to-end care not only at the data level and at the platform level, it also gave plenty of examples of IoT and the devices at the edge, often at the point of patient care.
Joe Miles from Google Healthcare and Life Science Solutions talked about the amazing work that Google is doing, including things like protein folding and assisting in HLS research.
Its new project and paper LIMoE: Learning Multiple Modalities with One Sparse Mixture-of-Experts Model was just released. LIMoE involves using machine learning to handle multiple tasks. One of the limitations with machine learning right now is it tends to be very task-specific. However, Google’s newly-released platform allows for users to route to different neural networks so they can essentially have a single neural network focused on multiple tasks.
Microsoft
A highlight for industry cloud and healthcare, Dr. David Rhew the Chief Medical Officer for Microsoft showed up to give a great presentation about the cloud for healthcare and the great work that Microsoft is doing, the integration with Teams, Azure, and the Health Bot. He also gave real-life examples of what they’re doing.
Workday
One of my favorite presentations was from Joe Wilson from Workday. One of the most interesting revelations from the presentation was that Workday currently holds the claim to fame of having more healthcare clients than any other cloud provider.
What I really liked about the Workday presentation is that Joe came with his engineering background and talked to us about security right out of the gate. Joe emphasized that Workday’s focus is not only on security or on the data itself, but also at the API level. He explained that because of the way that the team at Workday designed and deployed its API, it had an advantage in over its competitors in its popular healthcare offering.
Last Words about Cloud Wars Expo 2022
Wrapping up this event, it’s an amazing time with great people and great content about the future of the cloud and healthcare. You can more information about all we’ve covered and more in the content that’s up on the Acceleration Economy. I hope we’ll see you at the next event. Cheers!
