HIT Storage Challenges Addressed At HIMSS15

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

One of HIMSS15’s presentations came from DataCore Software, a provider of software-defined storage. The presentation was timely — data is becoming bigger, ever more important, and ever more difficult to contain and protect.

The Challenge Of Healthcare’s Big Data

Industry observers estimate that in 2011, data in the healthcare industry stood at around 150 exabytes (one million terabytes) in size. Since then, it’s increased at an annual rate of about 2.4 exabytes. Data is coming from sources including claims and EOBs, scanned medical reports, handwritten notes, diagnostic images, email messages, and voice dictation, among others. As the wearable and patient-generated data markets continue to explode, the industry will only see more challenge in the storage arena.

Addressing The Challenge

DataCore released this infographic to further highlight the challenges around addressing data in healthcare. It emphasizes the importance of continuous availability because of the life-critical nature of healthcare, and the fact that data is growing at a rate of 75 percent per year. These facts provide some detail:

• an average 3D CT scan takes up 1 GB of storage
• one person’s online medical record could possibly take up the same space as 12 billion novels
• the average hospital generates 800,000 patient records
• this year, IT will generate over 600 terabytes of data
• data storage is consuming more than 20 percent of the healthcare IT budget

According to company CEO, George Teixeira, “Healthcare organizations face many critical challenges when it comes to data and storage, and those challenges are only going to increase in the years ahead.”

For IT solutions providers, this confirms your clients’ approach to data must be regularly reviewed and adapted to reflect the ever-changing challenges of the healthcare arena.