The global healthcare industry is undergoing rapid digitization with medical records, diagnostic images, genomic data and other sensitive patient information increasingly stored in electronic formats. This has led to exponential growth in Healthcare Data that needs to be securely stored and easily accessible to providers and researchers worldwide.
The Growing Digital Transformation in Healthcare
In the last decade, there has been a massive shift from paper-based to electronic health records (EHRs) across hospitals and physician practices globally. Countries like Australia, UK, Canada and Scandinavian nations have nearly universal adoption of EHRs. Even developing nations are implementing digital health programs at a fast pace to modernize their systems.
As per estimates, over 80% of healthcare organizations now maintain digital patient records instead of physical files. Digitization allows round-the-clock access to complete medical histories from any location and integration of records across multiple healthcare providers. It has enhanced care coordination, reduced errors and improved outcomes.
However, digital transformation has its own challenges, namely managing the enormous volumes of healthcare data being generated. A single hospital generates terabytes of data daily from sources like CT/MRI scans, blood tests, pathology images and genetic sequencing data. Over their lifetime, a person is estimated to amass 1GB of health records on average.
With over 7 billion people globally accessing healthcare services, the total size of healthcare data worldwide runs into multiple exabytes, doubling every few years. Securely storing, sharing and deriving insights from this deluge of data is a gargantuan task requiring advanced data management solutions.
The Need for Robust and Compliant Healthcare Data Storage
Simply storing healthcare information on regional servers or public clouds brings risk of data loss or breach. Stringent regulations like HIPAA in the US and GDPR in the EU mandate advanced security, access controls, encryption, logging and other compliance measures for patient records.
Data localization laws also necessitate storing healthcare information for some countries or regions locally. The distributed nature further dictates replication of data across geographical zones for disaster recovery and ensuring service continuity during outages.
Additionally, hospitals need fast data access for day-to-day operations and emergencies. Important imaging studies, test results, medications, patient histories are required on demand by doctors and nurses. Any delays could compromise care. Data analytics for research, drug development, epidemiology studies also requires processing large datasets.
To address the above needs, leading healthcare providers deploy private, hyperconverged infrastructure to build secure data centers. They consolidate servers, storage, networking and virtualization onto a single integrated platform that uses all-flash arrays, replication, compression and other optimizations.
Object storage is gaining popularity to efficiently archive large unstructured files like DICOM and digital pathology images for decades. Meanwhile new AI platforms are deployed to glean insights by training complex models on petabytes of historical and real-time healthcare information.
Global Healthcare Cloud – A Future Of Shared Resources
With costs of building and maintaining private data centers increasing, healthcare organizations now explore collaborating on shared resources. The concept of a global healthcare cloud is emerging where providers pool computing and storage capabilities while respecting data sovereignty rules.
Such a shared infrastructure could leverage massive scale to drive down storage expenses, ensure survivability across regions in case of disasters and consolidate analytics capabilities. Caregivers anywhere could access data to deliver borderless care, cure diseases and resolve medical issues faster through open sharing of clinical knowledge.
One challenge will be integration across the disparate healthcare IT systems of different nations/facilities. Harmonization of data formats, semantic interoperability using standards like HL7/FHIR will be critical for deriving true value from aggregating insights. Privacy through distributed ledger/blockchain technologies preventing centralized control over sensitive medical records could also encourage open collaboration.
Cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google are strengthening their healthcare offerings with vertically integrated stacks, global networks, security controls and experience in handling critical industry workloads at hyper-scale. Partnerships with telecom sector providing high-bandwidth connectivity worldwide can realize the global healthcare cloud vision.
Though policy, technology and adoption hurdles remain, universal access to consolidated healthcare knowledge could achieve what individual facilities find difficult today – from reducing costs to curing diseases. Secure, compliant data storage managed sustainably will form the foundation for this future of connected care benefiting patients everywhere.
In summary, digitization is revolutionizing healthcare worldwide but also creating an unprecedented surge in sensitive digital data needing robust storage. While cloud adoption addresses costs and scalability concerns, data sovereignty, regulatory compliance, security, decentralization and global access still need solutions.
Advanced shared infrastructure, network connectivity worldwide, semantic interoperability standards and blockchain/AI promise a future of open healthcare data exchange benefiting researchers, doctors and patients globally through expedited insights and cures. However, managing security and trust across distributed systems hosting humanity's most critical information base will remain an ongoing challenge.
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