Mumbai, Maharashtra, India: The enormous growth of patient information that has to be saved, especially in light of patient safety issues and concerns, and the introduction of HIPAA regulations to provide security for patient information, have all contributed to the creation of a market for data storage specific to healthcare applications. While vendors have responded with platforms to meet the needs of healthcare applications, a crisis has resulted in the lack of interoperability of electronic medical records (EMRs) from one proprietary solution to another. In emergency situations the records have to be available where they are needed.

Frost & Sullivan (http://www.technicalinsights.frost.com) finds that key among the technologies being competitively developed for healthcare applications are information lifecycle management (ILM) with virtualization and tiered storage incorporated, picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), and advanced recovery management solutions.

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"Government regulations dictating patient privacy combined with the enormous growth in data related to all aspects of patient care have created a very substantial market for data storage technologies," explains Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Miriam C. Nagel. "One area of considerable growth is in diagnostic technologies that require digital storage for ready access to assure patient safety and to document care provided."

In the US, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and in the EU the European Convention on Human Rights both dictate right to privacy for patients, regulations that have vastly changed the data storage playing field for healthcare applications. Regulations have created the market that spawned the development of complete platforms to serve healthcare applications as the users in healthcare have limited IT resources to handle the technologies that are needed.

Patient data often has to be stored for many years, challenging the IT resources of many healthcare facilities for the complexity of the technologies and the cost. The longevity of storage mediums also can be challenged. But the biggest challenge has been created in the competition between vendors to provide for the healthcare market. A serious crisis has developed due to the lack of interoperability of electronic medical records (EMRs) from one platform to another making the records useless unless the patient stays in the same medical system.

"Except for government and military healthcare facilities the adoption of advanced data storage technologies by healthcare enterprises has not been fast and at smaller institutions and individual small medical practices it has been even slower," notes Nagel. "Cost and the complexity of data management platforms have contributed to the problem. The interoperability crisis has been addressed at the highest levels of government with edicts and recommendations for the development of interoperable health records in the near future."

To address the issues of complexity and storage medium longevity, leading vendors are developing information lifecycle management platforms with tiered storage that is more cost effective where all data does not require the same level of storage all the time and building storage virtualization into the platforms to make the IT management easier at the healthcare facilities. The longevity issues are being addressed by automated data migration as needed for both more cost effective storage and to keep the data on reliable storage mediums.

Advances in Data Storage for Healthcare Applications is part of the Technical Insights – Healthcare Subscription, which also includes research in the following markets: Emerging Technology Developments in Fusion Technology for Diagnostic Imaging, and Compression Technologies for Healthcare Applications. All research included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends that have been evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants. Interviews are available to the press.

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Advances in Data Storage for Healthcare Applications
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