By Sudharsan Aravamuthan – Head, Systems Engineering, Pure Storage India
World Health Day, observed annually on April 7th, is a day of global recognition and appreciation for the priceless worth of good health. Even as we commit to the goal of ‘health for all’, let us take a moment to reflect on the unprecedented technological transformations and resultant challenges in the healthcare sector.
With the pervasive integration of information technology in healthcare the most obvious advantages have been enhanced patient outcomes, diminished expenses, augmented efficacy in service delivery, and superior intercommunication among healthcare providers. The systemic challenge for the sector, in the wake of digital health technologies, telemedicine and electronic health records (to name a few), has been two-fold: overburdened IT infrastructure and the storage and management of data.
Addressing these challenges indeed impacts our journey towards achieving health for all.
‘It all starts with data’
As the healthcare industry continues to embrace advanced technologies, the volume of data
generated from patient records, medical devices, imaging tests, and other sources has increased exponentially. For healthcare service delivery, ensuring sustained advantages of implementing artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain technologies necessitates efficient data storage and management.
For any of the IT-enabled models to provide desired results, it is essential to be able to constantly feed data – data that is updated, accurate, and often life-saving, into these models without loss of time or efficiency.
One of the most promising areas for AI in healthcare is diagnostic imaging. Machine learning algorithms can be trained to recognize patterns in medical images, allowing for faster and more accurate diagnoses. AI can also be used to analyze patient data and identify at-risk populations, enabling healthcare providers to deliver proactive care and reduce hospital readmissions. AI can have a significant impact in drug discovery as well. By analyzing vast amounts of data, AI algorithms can identify potential drug candidates more quickly and accurately than traditional methods. Blockchain, while providing a secure and transparent way to store and share healthcare data, also generates significant blocks of data.
Managing and delivering the data needed to train and nurture advances in technology, requires enterprise thinking that builds on a strong foundation of data storage infrastructure to achieve scalability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness and security.
Take the example of enterprise imaging. Imaging is one of the most resource-intensive healthcare data that can flood existing IT infrastructure. Not to mention the heightened exposure faced by patients. Enterprise imaging works by collecting this evolving data in a universally accessible location, anchored in storage technologies, such as electronic health records, clinical data hubs and all-flash array storage.
Revolutionizing storage infrastructure in a ‘flash’
The advent of flash storage has brought about a substantial transformation in healthcare IT. As conventional hard drives, legacy storage solutions and even cloud storage become insufficient to meet storage requirements, flash storage has emerged as a swifter and more efficient solution.
Flash storage can dramatically enhance the speed of accessing and retrieving data which is critical in emergency situations where healthcare providers need to make quick yet informed decisions resulting in improved patient outcomes.
Highly scalable, dependable and durable, it can easily expand to meet the present, emergent and future storage needs of healthcare organizations. It ensures data integrity and privacy, and is significantly less susceptible to mechanical failures than traditional hard drives, thereby ensuring better data security and recovery, minimising downtime and increasing data availability.
Interoperability is a pressing issue for the healthcare sector, where the facilitation of seamless data exchange between different systems and applications can not only enhance patient outcomes but also reduce costs and augment efficiency. And data storage solutions have the potential to enable interoperability by providing a centralised repository for patient data that is accessible by a multitude of systems and applications.
As emerging technologies like AI and blockchain continue to transform healthcare service delivery, advanced data storage solutions are going to be pivotal in supporting these technologies and ensuring that the data they generate can be safely and efficiently stored, processed, and analyzed. Therefore, ongoing investment in cutting-edge modern data experience is crucial for us to achieve the goals of improved patient outcomes and a more efficient healthcare system.