According to new research, small and medium businesses (SMBs) with fewer than 250 employees that adopt innovative cloud technology and AI can drive a huge productivity boost to the UK economy.

For healthcare in particular, cloud-supported SMBs could facilitate 58 million remote health consultations annually by 2030, providing a significant uptick in breadth of care across the UK.

The UK health system is facing an increasing demand on its services. The National Health Service (NHS) goals for 2023/2024 include recovering its productivity and plans to continue on the trajectory to deliver 50 million more appointments in general practice by March 2024.

New research from the Realising a Cloud-enabled Economy: How Micro, Small and Medium Sized Businesses Drive Economic Growth and Societal Impact report – commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and undertaken by Accenture – shows that SMBs could provide valuable productivity benefits for the healthcare economy.

It added that there was also the potential to enhance the quality and availability of patient care in a cloud-enabled economy (defined in Accenture’s report as 90% of all businesses adopting at least a basic level of cloud).

The research from Accenture shows that cloud technology has already enabled small businesses to support virtual healthcare, such as telehealth consultations and GP appointment bookings.

This reduces the travel time for patients by allowing them to have consultations at work or home. These technologies are also enabling doctors to access and enter medical information into patient records more easily, ensuring a seamless approach to virtual and remote healthcare.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), approximately 16% of the UK’s population live in rural and remote areas making access to consistent and high-quality healthcare more of a challenge.

Digital technology is providing improved remote access points and supporting the remote monitoring of health conditions and indicators in UK populations.

Digital tools and apps are underpinned by cloud technology, which ensures that medical data can be stored and accessed securely, and provides the flexibility for these services to scale as usage grows or there is a sudden spike in demand.

Quality of patient care can also be enhanced through increased digitisation. For example, healthcare providers can adopt AI tools to support clinical decision-making.

These tools can help professionals analyse large amounts of patient data quickly and draw valuable insights to support the identification of possible treatment options.

‘C the Signs’ is a UK healthcare SMB that uses big data and AI to identify patients with cancer at the earliest and most curable stage.

Founded by two doctors, Dr Miles Payling and Dr Bhavagaya Bakshi saw first-hand the grave impact of late diagnosis in cancer patients and were driven to create a solution to help increase cancer patient survival rates.

Using a cloud-based model and AI features, the platform supports clinicians in rapidly assessing a patient’s risk of cancer and identifies next steps, in under 30 seconds. Now trusted by over 10,000 healthcare professionals across the UK, providers using C the Signs have seen a 12.5% increase in cancer detection.

Cloud and AI is also reducing the volume of manual and paper-based administration.  Innovative technology is providing a streamlined and smoother process across the bulk of administrative tasks, freeing up practitioners to focus on delivering patient care. For example, through using cloud and generative AI to automatically generate clinical notes by analysing clinician-patient conversations.

The Accenture report states that use of the cloud in small businesses could enhance healthcare efficiencies, unlocking £3.3 billion annually in the UK by 2030 (an increase of £1 billion from current rates).

Research and development efforts within healthcare can be enhanced through data analytics, AI and ML, which leverages cloud technology to process and analyse large data sets.

An example is UK health-tech start-up, Akrivia Health, which fast-tracks medical research and trials for dementia and mental health using AI.

In the UK, 7% of over 65s live with dementia and one in four adults experience a diagnosable mental health issue every year.

The need for treatments, however, is significantly unmet and development requires sifting through large amounts of medical data. Akrivia uses cloud-based natural language processing to capture, decipher and arrange de-identified patient data from underutilised records.

The technology has enabled over 4.5 million records to be reviewed, providing millions of vital information points across medical history, symptoms and medication, driving forward invaluable medical research.

SMBs play a vital role in meeting patient needs and maintaining community health.  Increased adoption of the cloud, AI and other advanced technologies will be vital for meeting future healthcare needs. To achieve a cloud-enabled healthcare economy, however, there are still barriers to overcome.

Maintaining compliance in highly regulated and rapidly evolving industries such as healthcare can be challenging. In an Accenture survey, businesses expressed concerns around cybersecurity, specifically compliance risks and regulatory uncertainty.

To resolve this, businesses can review the policies and features of their cloud provider to ensure they align with their company or if necessary establish their own internal policies. It’s also important to work with cloud providers who provide a wide range of certifications and compliance programmes.

Smaller businesses often lack the necessary IT infrastructure, both in terms of software and hardware, to update legacy systems and implement new, cloud-based strategies.

Moving to the cloud has cost benefits, as organisations are not required to maintain physical infrastructure and only pay for the cloud compute services they use on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Businesses looking to transition to the cloud can access the UK Government’s cloud programmes, which offer incentives to accelerate cloud maturity, as well as leveraging start-up accelerator programmes offered by third parties.

Finally, the report highlights a lack of digital skills among employees as a top barrier to cloud adoption, with 36% of respondents citing this issue.

To help overcome this, SMBs can use existing resources and digital training programmes run by the UK Government and third parties to upskill employees.

AWS for example provides AWS Industry Quest: Healthcare, an interactive learning experience that teaches healthcare professionals how to build cloud solutions.

Through unlocking billions for the UK healthcare system, facilitating millions of telehealth consultations and contributing to medical research to enhance treatment options, SMBs will shape the future of the UK healthcare industry.

To unlock their potential, small businesses need support to adopt advanced digital technologies through increased education on security, availability of government incentives and wider access to external training programmes to upskill their staff for the future.

Dr Andrew Jones is Head of Clinical Innovation at Amazon Web Services