The healthcare industry is generating vast amounts of data every day through electronic health records, medical imaging, genomic sequencing, medical research and more. This massive growth of healthcare data presents both opportunities and challenges for data storage and management. Let's take a closer look at some key trends driving the need for more robust healthcare data storage solutions globally.

Rise of Digital Health Records

One of the biggest drivers of increased Healthcare Data is the widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs). Governments and healthcare providers around the world have been pushing for digitalization of patient health records to improve care coordination, reduce medical errors and enable data-driven insights. According to analysts, the EHR market is expected to reach $38 billion by 2025 as more countries implement national EHR programs.

This transition to digital health records has led to exponential growth of structured and unstructured patient data that needs to be securely stored and accessible to authorized healthcare professionals. Just a single patient may have tens or even hundreds of megabytes worth of clinical notes, diagnostic images, lab results and other records. Multiply this by millions of patients that a large hospital or national health system treats annually, and the data storage requirements become enormous.

Medical Imaging Data Explosion

Medical imaging technologies like X-rays, CT, MRI and ultrasound continue to become more advanced and prevalent across both developed and developing countries. However, each scan produces very large files - a single MRI scan can be over 1 GB in size. It is estimated that over 75% of healthcare data globally consists of medical images.

With aging populations undergoing more scans and new imaging techniques like whole-body MRI scans emerging, radiological data storage demands have ballooned significantly. A large hospital may be generating terabytes worth of new imaging data every single day. Long-term archiving and retrieval of these images also requires huge storage capacities that can withstand the test of time. Failures in medical imaging storage can delay diagnosis and treatment, compromising patient safety.

Genomic and Precision Medicine Data

Precision or personalized medicine that uses an individual's genomic and other molecular data is revolutionizing how diseases like cancer are diagnosed and treated. However, genomic sequencing technology also produces extraordinary amounts of complex data - a single whole human genome can be over 100 GB in size after sequencing.

As genomic testing becomes more mainstream, healthcare data storage infrastructure needs to scale tremendously to support clinical delivery of precision medicine. National genomic initiatives are now producing petabytes worth of genomic data that need to be properly managed, secured and made accessible to researchers worldwide. This represents both a technical challenge as well as an opportunity to fuel medical discoveries through analytics on massive genomic datasets.

Meeting Growing Storage Demands

It is clear healthcare data storage volumes will continue increasing exponentially driven by the trends mentioned earlier. Meeting these swelling demands requires transitioning to modern, scalable storage platforms that offer higher capacities, improved performance, non-stop availability and powerful data management capabilities.

Moving to Scalable Cloud Storage

Cloud storage services have emerged as a compelling solution strategy for healthcare organizations facing significant budget and resource constraints. Cloud platforms provide seemingly limitless, elastic storage capacity that automatically scales as data volumes increase over time. They eliminate upfront capital expenditures on storage hardware and reduce total cost of ownership.

Leading public cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud have developed HIPAA-compliant solutions tailored for healthcare and life sciences workloads. They deliver sophisticated data protection, encryption, access control and other features essential for sensitive medical data. Migrating non-critical data to the cloud frees up valuable on-premise storage for mission-critical healthcare applications.

Harnessing AI and Analytics

In addition to addressing storage capacity issues, organizations are looking to derive more value from their healthcare big data. Cloud-based AI and analytics services can help extract insights from petabytes of clinical, genomic and other data. This enables personalized risk prediction, early disease detection, drug discovery, population health management and more.

By pairing rich healthcare datasets with serverless computing environments, researchers and clinicians can run complex modeling, machine learning and other analytics at scale without concerns about hardware resources. Cloud makes it easier to share datasets broadly within research communities as well, fueling discovery.

Overcoming Security and Compliance Hurdles

While cloud technologies offer compelling benefits, ensuring security, privacy and compliance of sensitive patient data remains paramount. Healthcare providers require military-grade encryption of data in transit and at rest, strict user access controls, auditable data access logs and other safeguards. Regulators continue enhancing requirements around data protection as threats evolve.

Meeting all mandatory security, privacy and compliance policies like HIPAA has been a primary challenge preventing wider cloud adoption especially in the US. However, cloud vendors are actively working to expand their certification and compliance portfolios to give customers confidence their workloads are fully protected on their infrastructure.

Overall, In summary, explosive healthcare data growth driven by digital transformation trends worldwide necessitates innovative storage strategies that provide limitless scale, performance and value to organizations. Cloud storage platforms present a scalable approach to solve capacity issues while also enabling new data-driven capabilities through analytics. With tighter security and compliance assurances, cloud will increasingly become the standard infrastructure for sustainable global healthcare data storage moving forward.

Get more insights on this topic:  https://ai.memorial/read-blog/39914