Cloud Computing: A Key Enabler for Smart Healthcare Mervat Adib Bamiah Advanced Informatics School Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia mervatbamiah@yahoo.com Sarfraz Nawaz Brohi Advanced Informatics School Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia sarfraz_brohi@hotmail.com Suriayati Chuprat Advanced Informatics School Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia scsuria@gmail.com Abstract—Cloud computing acts as a key success factor to leverage and enable development of smart healthcare. Healthcare sector is information critical industry that deals with human lives. Transforming from traditional paper work to automated and electronic healthcare has enhanced the medical process and implemented green concepts by saving loads of papers and physical files not to mention error prone efficient medical services. Evolvement of information and communication technology accelerated the agile way of thinking and facilitated the innovation of smart technologies such as telemedicine, smart mobiles, smart cards, robots, sensors, RFID’s that are context aware and able to sense and diagnose complex situations since these systems are ubiquitous, online, intelligent, predictive and capable to decide and interact with the environment. These diverse smart systems and technologies requires a way to integrate and work in different technology platforms in order to be utilized in easy, efficient and effective way. Cloud computing offers a flexible, cost effective, collaborative, multi-tenant technology which acts as a key role in transforming the traditional electronic healthcare into smart healthcare that combines the latest technologies via the internet on pay-per-use basis. This research paper represents the definition of smart healthcare and the role of cloud computing as a key success factor for enabling smart healthcare. Keywords-Cloud Computing;Smart Healthcare; Smart Home I. INTRODUCTION The advent of information technology has brought many advantages as well as challenges to healthcare sector. Improving efficiency and error prone cost effective real time quality of healthcare services are the basic objectives of automating and digitalizing the way people access and process their information. Traditional method of healthcare had various issues such as the healthcare work flow process was dependent on paper work. Physical file storage was done in the clinic/hospital storage cabinets which offered limited capacity against the increasing population demands. Lack of real time communication between patients in rural places caused insufficient service and sometimes death or severe side effects to the patients in case of crisis. Increasing number of patients and their multiple needs of reports, x-rays and laboratory tests leads to insufficient storage, waste of time and effort to search for data especially for some old data. IT solutions such as electronic health brought huge benefits in solving issues of human errors and providing an agile way of accessing and processing large volume of patient’s information as well as saving papers and storage space. However, the increasing number of population and the accelerating innovations of nanotechnology, smart phones, healthcare devices, sensors, RFID’s…, have created big issues of how to integrate and link all this together , where to save these huge amount of information and access it so easy[1]. The trend to innovate smart houses for home care especially for elder and disabled people and their communication with the hospital via the internet also needs to be highly sufficient to deliver the medical service in real time. Cloud computing evolved as a new IT paradigm to provide an agile method to deliver healthcare services in smart way. Cloud computing is a business model that has inherited the benefit of other technologies such as grid, distributed, utility computing, pervasive, ubiquitous and virtualization to deliver cost effective, scalable, multi-tenant and pay-per-use services. It is suitable for easy and complex systems. The huge benefit of cloud computing in healthcare is that it will support current electronic healthcare sector and the future trend smart healthcare systems as it provides latest standardize applications through SaaS, IT tools for developers via PaaS, virtualization and infrastructure with IaaS. It facilitates the communication between the patient and the doctor from any device\any where through the internet in real time that will deliver higher quality real time cost effective agile healthcare services. This paper is organized as follows: section two defines smart healthcare. Section three defines the importance of smartness in health care sector. Section four discusses benefits of cloud computing for healthcare sector. Section five discusses role of cloud computing in smart healthcare. Finally section six discusses the challenges and future work of cloud computing in smart healthcare sector. II. SMART HEALTHCARE The need to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare not only in hospitals but also in homes is becoming more and more important for patients and society worldwide. The availability of new technologies such as micro technologies, telecommunication, smart mobiles, and flexible sensors facilitated the development of user-friendly devices that are more comfortable and secure for the patient. Smart healthcare contains smart systems, telemedicine, smart