The amount of data generated across global healthcare systems is growing exponentially each year. Fueled by new medical technologies, connected devices, electronic health records, medical imaging, and other digitized services, the volume of healthcare data worldwide has skyrocketed. It is now estimated that over 2.5 exabytes of healthcare data are created each year, with that figure projected to increase more than tenfold by 2025 as digital transformation accelerates across the industry. Managing and protecting this immense volume of sensitive patient information presents unique challenges for healthcare providers and data storage professionals.
However, this data deluge also unlocks powerful opportunities to advance care, research, and outcomes. When harnessed responsibly and effectively, healthcare big data can help deliver personalized, predictive, and preventative care models. Deeper insights into populations can support new drug and therapy development while reducing costs. With dataprivacy and security prioritized, digital innovation holds great promise for transforming lives on a global scale.
A Diverse and Healthcare Data Storage Industry
The Healthcare Data Storage estate is highly diverse and distributed across thousands of independent systems worldwide. Records are generated and held locally by hospitals, physician practices, laboratories, insurers, and other care facilities. Meanwhile, medical devices, telemedicine platforms, fitness trackers, and other consumer technologies produce insights at the edge.
Coordinating storage, governance, and access across this complex, decentralized infrastructure presents unique logistical challenges compared to other industries. Solutions must accommodate a variety of technical standards, regional regulations, organizational workflows, and site-specific resources and constraints. Data silos remain common despite initiatives to centralize electronic health records and share information seamlessly between care teams.
Ensuring High Performance and Resiliency
With patients’ well-being dependent on continuous data availability, healthcare storage infrastructures require extraordinary levels of performance, resilience, and reliability compared to commercial or non-critical workloads. Downtime or data loss are simply not options that risk harming lives. Storage platforms must support 24/7 operations, 99.999% uptime guarantees, automatic failover and disaster recovery capabilities for business and site continuity.
Petabyte-scale databases and medical imaging repositories demand high-performance backend architectures to deliver sub-second response times for resource-intensive queries, image analysis, and AI model training. Bandwidth and throughput must scale elastically to handle real-time workflows as well as batch processing jobs. Managing data growth over the long-term through automated tiering and archives is also essential given data volumes regularly doubling year-over-year.
Compliance with Strict Global Regulations
No industry faces stricter data protection standards than healthcare due to the sensitivity of patient information and implications of privacy breaches. Global frameworks like GDPR in the European Union, HIPAA in the United States, and myriad country- and region-specific statutes lay out exacting rules around access controls, encryption, physical security, disaster recovery, and individual rights like access, correction and erasure that storage infrastructure must enforce.
Auditing and reporting features provide transparency while automated tools help remediate issues and prove ongoing compliance. Solutions should seamlessly integrate security features like multifactor authentication, data masking, encryption-at-rest and in-flight without compromising performance or availability. Vendor certifications also give credibility that best practices are followed throughout development and operations.
The Future of Healthcare Data Management
As value-based care shifts reimbursables based on outcomes rather than services rendered, healthcare organizations are under growing pressure to extract maximum value from their troves of patient data through advanced analytics and AI. Edge computing and 5G networks will push processing and deriving insights closer to where data originates for applications like medical imaging diagnosis, telemedicine, and remote patient monitoring.
The future, distributed ledgers may provide tamper-proof recordkeeping while decentralized storage architectures promote sharing between independent systems on a global scale. Whether centralized, distributed or edge-based, the core requirements of performance, security and compliance will remain paramount as custodians of our most sensitive information. With prudent planning and technological progress, healthcare’s data-driven revolution can transform patient care worldwide while respecting individual privacy in this new age of exabytes.
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it
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Ravina Pandya, Content Writer, has a strong foothold in the market research industry. She specializes in writing well-researched articles from different industries, including food and beverages, information and technology, healthcare, chemical and materials, etc. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravina-pandya-1a3984191)