January 29, 2010, 4:21 pm
Why Hospital Data is Growing: Genetic Testing, EMRs, and the “-Ologies”
by Lisa Agustin
Filed under: Business, Technology
As a UX consultant with clients in the healthcare arena, I’m not unfamiliar with the kinds of data needed by employees on a hospital intranet, or by current and prospective patients on a public site. But I’m usually more concerned about the best way for people to find this information, rather than where it’s coming from and how it gets managed.
So I was especially interested in the Global Information Industry Center at UCSD’s eye-opening report on data growth in hospitals. (If the group’s name sounds familiar, these are the same folks who recently concluded that Americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information per day in 2008). Eleven healthcare IT executives (nine from major medical research-focused medical centers and two from medical insurance organizations) were asked to estimate their future rates of growth and identify the reasons behind it.
Author Jack Robert identifies the following as the six main drivers of growth:
- Image Technology. The number of images generated by each “ology” (radiology, cardiology, etc.) is growing both locally and centrally. The ability to create thinner and denser slices of organs makes for huge images; a single slice can be as big as 1 gigabyte.
- Web 2.0 Applications. Web-based software that enables a medical team to provide care collaboratively is a growing trend. An example of this: medication list management, where every care team member has the ability to list, delete, or annotate a patient’s list of medicines.
- Clinical Decision Support for Physicians. Physicians are treating more patients, and thus have less time to spend with each one. As a result, they expect instant, anytime access to data and specialty applications to help in their decision making process. This means a heavy reliance on electronic medical records for patients (see next).
- The Electronic Medical Record (EMR). The number of hospitals and physician offices using this is currently small, but wider adoption is expected in the coming years for two reasons: the realization that the current healthcare system is too expensive, and the federal stimulus incentives that will be given to hospitals and clinicians who demonstrate “meaningful use” of EMRs by 2011. The what-if scenario of an EMR for every person in the U.S. is staggering in terms of data size.
- Health Networks. These community initiatives will connect physicians, hospitals, health centers, labs, and patients electronically, building upon the capabilities of EMRs by collecting information from multiple medical sites, processing it, and providing it to physician offices.
- Genetic Testing. Genetic testing for high-risk patients will serve as another potentially huge source of new data, given that “there are now 2500 diseases for which there is a genetic test.”
The main problem with this growth is how best to manage it all. Much of the data is decentralized (especially in the case of research data), difficult to backup due to the increasing size of databases, and replicated by default (e.g., the processing of a blood workup means information is duplicated and stored in multiple places). But while there is no easy answer on how to address the exponential growth of medical data, the one hope is that the end result is improved and more efficient care for all patients.
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