Health Care: EHR Data Storage Costs to be Minimal

The implementation of EHR systems are ultimately expected to make both hospitals and physicians more efficient, less error prone, and to save money.  A study by CDW HealthCare in late 2010 estimates that while adoption of an EHR system could cost a physician $120,000 on average, without considering federal government stimulus incentive spending, the system will have more than paid for itself in just one year.  Most of the savings are expected to come from  efficiencies.  EHR systems allow physicians to see as many as 15 percent more patients, and that can amount to as much as additional $150,000 revenues over the course of one year.

John Karl of CDW HealthCare said that “through a more efficient use of the EHR system, you can actually accelerate the speed by which you or your staff can provide care…  The quicker you’re able to integrate the solution into your practice, the quicker you’re recouping your investment and setting your path to meaningful use.”

A calculation by John D. Halamka, MD, chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School, finds that the storage costs of EHRs are one of the few bargain prices items you’ll find in today’s health care environment.  Halamka’s calculation considered the 250,000 EHRs now stored at BIDMC.  Those records today occupy roughly 20 terabytes of data.  He calculates that at today’s price of storage that it will cost about $.42 to store text data for 15 years for an individual and another $1.89 to store imaging data for an individual over 7 years.  After that, Halamka estimates that the cost to store text will be $.05 per year for text and $.47 per year for imaging data.

Halamka comments that “the equivalent of Moore’s law applies to storage – continuously decreasing costs and higher density. We’ll also have cloud storage options (although no public cloud provider yet offers HIPAA compliant storage with indemnification for privacy breaches).”

Halamka points out that the while these costs are minimal, there are factors which can magnify those costs.  These include:

• EHRs will increasingly include ‘raw data’ from medical sensors which is collected for a patient.
• EHRs will increasingly include more ‘multi-media’ data, including imaging and voice.  This data tends to be large and can cause the amount of data stored to grow.
• Disaster replication will mean patient data will be replicated at remote locations.  The data may also be cached locally to improve access speeds.

But when compared to the costs of physical record storage, the relative cost of EHR storage is  small small.  All of the cavaets that Halamka mentions are actually vast improvements over the capabilities now possible for managing physical based health records.  The cost involved with the storage of large amounts of multi-media data and the replication of paper and physical documents to be used for remote disaster recovery would be staggering compared to the costs involved with the digital storage as EHRs of the same information.