by The digital revolution has completely transformed how healthcare data is collected and stored. With the widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), massive amounts of sensitive patient data are now being generated, collected, and stored digitally. EHRs allow doctors and hospitals to easily capture and track a comprehensive medical history for each patient. This data includes information like medications, allergies, treatments, diagnostic test results, and more. The benefits of digital records are substantial for both providers and patients, however it has created new challenges around securely storing this rapidly expanding volume of data.
Compliance with Strict Privacy Laws and Regulations
As Healthcare Data Storage breaches continue making headlines, government agencies have responded by enacting strict privacy laws to protect citizens’ medical records. In the United States, requirements under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) establish security standards that healthcare providers and organizations must adhere to. Non-compliance can result in hefty monetary penalties. Other countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and members of the European Union have implemented similar nationwide standards. Storage solutions deployed to manage patient data are being held to increasingly rigorous testing to ensure they provide robust security, access controls, encryption, and auditing capabilities. Solution providers must obtain necessary certifications verifying their platforms meet all regulatory guidelines.
Rise of Telehealth and Healthcare Data Storage Industry
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of virtual care solutions as in-person appointments were restricted or avoided. Telehealth visits skyrocketed providing alternative access to non-emergency care. Remote patient monitoring also expanded, allowing chronic conditions to be managed from home through devices that transmit biometric data to clinicians. This connectivity is generating exponential growth in the volume of healthcare data being captured outside of traditional clinical settings. Robust storage infrastructures are needed that can securely ingest, process, and retain this distributed medical information in compliance with all applicable laws and data sovereignty principles. Multi-cloud strategies may be required to address global data residency rules and provide redundancy.
Demand for Analytics and Machine Learning
As the pool of healthcare data expands, there is increasing interest from researchers, drug companies, insurers, and providers to leverage it for advanced analytics and machine learning applications. By using techniques like predictive modeling, natural language processing, and deep learning, new insights can be uncovered to support drug discovery, optimize clinical trials, improve outcomes, and reduce costs. However, these initiatives require integration with scalable storage platforms that can quickly deliver petabytes of structured and unstructured patient data for modeling. Solutions are needed that facilitate fast querying and exploration of huge datasets while maintaining privacy and security controls. Analytics environments also call for metadata tagging and data virtualization capabilities.
Interoperability Between Diverse Systems
Most healthcare organizations utilize a mix of best-of-breed applications from various vendors to support different core functions like EHRs, laboratory information systems, radiology, billing and more. However, achieving seamless interoperability between these disparate clinical and administrative systems has proven challenging. To fully leverage data for analytics and care coordination, common standards, APIs and integration layers are required that allow these solutions to securely and reliably exchange information. Vendors are working to certify their platforms can orchestrate data flows between a heterogeneous clinical IT ecosystem while maintaining patient matching, context preservation and maintaining data provenance over time.
Globalization of Healthcare and Medical Tourism
In an increasingly connected world, patients are seeking care options outside of their home country. Medical tourism allows those willing to travel to access procedures or specialties not easily available domestically at a lower cost. This trend is driving requirements for cross-border clinical data exchange adherence to facilitate continuity of care. Moreover, healthcare providers and insurers with international operations need centralized visibility into a patient’s complete medical history regardless of where treatment occurred. Data residency regulations add complexities but also opportunities for geo-redundant storage deployments that replicate information to multiple regions for low latency access worldwide.
The digitization of healthcare has created incredible amounts of valuable patient data but also placed immense pressure on storage infrastructures globally to keep up with demand. Solutions are urgently needed that can securely and compliantly retain rapidly growing volumes of structured and unstructured medical information while also powering new use cases for analytics, virtual care, international data sharing, and more. Certified platforms offering scalability, multi-region deployments, advanced query capabilities and interoperability will be critical to enable new care delivery and research models powered by Big Data in the years ahead.
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it
Author Bio:
Money Singh is a seasoned content writer with over four years of experience in the market research sector. Her expertise spans various industries, including food and beverages, biotechnology, chemical and materials, defense and aerospace, consumer goods, etc. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/money-singh-590844163)
