The volume of healthcare data generated globally is increasing exponentially with the adoption of digital technologies across various areas like telehealth, clinical trials, precision medicine, genome sequencing etc. As per a recent report published by CoherentMI, the global healthcare industry is estimated to produce around 2,314 exabytes (EB) of data annually by 2020. With the rapid growth in digital healthcare initiatives, the demand for secure and scalable healthcare data storage solutions is rising significantly. Healthcare organizations are investing heavily in data management infrastructure to effectively store, share and analyze this massive amount of healthcare data in compliance with regulatory requirements.
Data Regulations and Compliance
As healthcare data contains highly sensitive personal information of patients, it needs to be safeguarded and handled in accordance with various international and regional data protection laws like HIPAA, GDPR, etc. Ensuring privacy and security of patient data has become one of the top priorities for healthcare institutions globally. Healthcare data storage solutions utilized by compliant managed IT in Orlando offer data security features like encryption, authentication, and audit trails to be compliant with regulations. They also need to ensure patient data is only accessed by authorized individuals on a need-to-know basis. Data sovereignty and local data storage are another important compliance requirement, especially in regions like the European Union.
Data Storage Technologies
Leading healthcare data storage technologies used today include On-premise storage, Cloud storage and Hybrid storage. CoherentMI highlights in Healthcare Data Storage Market, how each technology has its own advantages depending on specific use cases and compliance needs:
- On-premise Storage: Traditional on-premise systems offer full control over data with high security but require large upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs. They are preferred where regulatory restrictions do not allow moving data to cloud.
- Cloud Storage: Cloud-based shared infrastructure lowers upfront costs and offers scalability. However, some healthcare organizations hesitate to move sensitive data to public cloud over data security and sovereignty concerns. Private cloud and hybrid cloud models are gaining more acceptance to overcome these barriers.
- Hybrid Storage: Hybrid storage solutions seamlessly integrate on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure to leverage benefits of both. They provide flexibility to store non-critical data in cloud for analytics while keeping sensitive data locally. This is emerging as the most viable option for long-term healthcare data management.
Health Data Analytics
Advanced analytics of aggregated clinical and patient data holds immense potential to fuel lifesaving medical insights, optimize care delivery and enable precision medicine. Healthcare organizations are tapping into AI/ML technologies on their stored health data mines to:
– Gain clinical and research insights by analyzing patterns, predict outcomes and support physicians in diagnosis and treatment.
– Improve patient outcomes and experience through predictive analytics, personalized care plans and preventive strategies.
– Enhance operational efficiencies of healthcare systems using supply chain, staff and capacity optimization based on analytics.
– Support drug discovery, clinical trials and new therapeutic areas through ‘real world evidence’ generated from analytics. Also, it is proving to be a game-changer in the context of personalized medicine, as it allows for the tailored analysis of patient profiles and treatment responses, guiding HCS High Content Screening towards more precise and individualized drug discovery strategies.
However, ensuring data privacy and regulations while enabling analytics at scale remains a key challenge for healthcare storage providers to address. New-age techniques like federated learning are gaining adoption to overcome barriers of data centralization for healthcare analytics.
Market Outlook
The global healthcare data storage market size is projected to witness double digit CAGR over the next five years, according to a recent study by CoherentMI. Factors like growing digitization initiatives, exponential rise in healthcare data volumes, enhanced analytics applications and rising focus on value-based care are expected to majorly drive this growth. Regionally, North America is expected to dominate the market, backed by advanced healthcare IT adoption, presence of leading storage solution providers and continued strategic investments by key market players in the region. Asia Pacific is anticipated to be the fastest growing regional market owing to rising healthcare expenditures, growing medical tourism and government initiatives towards digital healthcare transformation in emerging economies like India and China. As healthcare organizations aim to harness the value of data as a strategic asset, data-driven transformation is seen gaining bigger priority, fueling further growth opportunities in healthcare data storage sector globally.
