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Health Care Data Storage: Health Care IT Executives Worry about Rapid Data Growth
Over the next two years, data managed by health care providers about their patients and their businesses is expected to increase dramatically. Three drivers for the huge uptake of data, as identified in an Iron Mountain report on HIMSS analytics, include:
- Health records will increasingly be stored electronically and the volume of information stored as health organizations migrate towards a paperless environment
- A change in the system of diagnosis codes (migration from ICD-9 to ICD-10) will increase the number of diagnosis types from 14,000 to 68,000.
- Meaningful Use data-sharing requirements will result in more data being collected and stored
Lorren Pettit, vice president, market research for HIMSS Analytics, said that “by 2015, most hospitals are expected to have undergone a massive, data- and reform-driven transformation. With all the guidelines for coding and sharing information, along with the move to electronic medical records, hospitals will have created an exponential proliferation of data volume… All that data is generating problems that senior health care IT executives are not currently considering, making the need to develop a successful strategy to manage and protect that data essential.”
Michael Leonard, director of product management at Iron Mountain, said that “the amount of data flowing through our healthcare system today has rendered the old ways of managing it obsolete… Most hospitals continue to treat all data the same and don’t sufficiently tier it based on its importance and access requirements. Data vital to the business and near-term clinical operations should be backed up to remote data centers, allowing for fast access and protecting the data from extreme weather events or other disasters that could wipe out onsite servers. Less active data being kept for compliance reasons or future research needs doesn’t require the same level of access and can be stored on offline media.”
