16 As the population ages, it will continue to need high-quality medical care, which will generate an ever-expanding amount of electronic Patient Health Information (ePHI). Just in health-related imaging alone, healthcare providers will need a vast amount of stored images for their patients. This data will need to be kept private, have its integrity maintained, be easy and quick to access, and should be relatively low-cost. As health costs rise, keeping data storage affordable is as important as ever. The US spent 17.9 percent of its 2017 GDP on healthcare, for a total of $35 trillion. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is predicted to have a £30 billion shortfall by 2020. Costs are expected to continue to rise, as well. As the infographic below shows, Emergency Rooms using image-enabled health information exchanges (HIEs) were able to show a $19 million annual savings in the US by not having to repeat image-related CT scans, ultrasounds, and chest x-rays. This reliable access to health-related imagery storage shows a clear financial savings, along with saving patient’s lives. When looking for storage for your own ePHI records, you’ll need to make sure it can scale cost-effectively, can provide data that is unchanged and uncorrupted, can be retrieved quickly, and is simple enough to manage, reducing data management across your IT department and end users. That and a low total cost of ownership (TCO) will ensure both a cost savings as well as a positive impact on patient health outcomes.
