Healthcare: Moving at the Speed of Technology

Modernizing healthcare infrastructure will lead to better patient outcomes.

As healthcare technology innovations impact every area of the patient experience, data helps healthcare and life sciences organizations transform care – from diagnosis to treatment to prevention. Advancements in medical devices, IoT and analytics are founded not only upon the idea of collecting more data than ever, but that this data can be used to recommend solutions and define treatments.

To get there, healthcare is rapidly adopting  artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), neural networks, intelligent algorithms and automation – solutions and systems that exponentially drive-up data and the need to access and store it. AI and ML, for example, dramatically impact the speed at which data is collected and analyzed, and deep learning requires significantly more and more data to continue learning and training algorithms. It’s no surprise, then, that approximately 30% of the world’s data volume is being generated by the healthcare industry.

Growth in the volume and type of data in healthcare environments, as well as the ability to secure information and meet regulatory and compliance requirements, becomes even more challenging as the value of healthcare data and privacy increases. As the value of healthcare data escalates, so does its value to malicious attackers who seek to profit from intrusive operations. In fact, healthcare accounted for 79% of all reported data breaches in 2020.

Healthcare and life sciences organizations need to be able to support technology-enabled care (TEC), leverage connected health initiatives, and meet privacy and compliance demands while managing explosive data growth. The key: connecting IT transformation and business transformation with modernized infrastructure that makes it simpler, more reliable and secure to turn data into value for patients, providers, researchers and healthcare systems. 

What’s driving healthcare modernization – and storage challenges?

Once a siloed environment, today healthcare and research have become more centralized as data and infrastructures evolve to support a more collaborative, efficient means of delivery and discovery. By centralizing data, providers, systems and life sciences organizations can leverage next generation tools, such as AI and ML, to improve diagnosis and treatment, as well as enable advanced analytics to impact costs. An example of this is vendor-neutral archives (VNAs), which enable medical staff to view images across service lines to give providers a complete, holistic view of patient health. Electronic health records (EHRs) have also greatly improved the ability for providers to view a patient’s entire medical history regardless of where services were provided, or who provided them, and improving cross-disciplinary care.

But even though data consolidation brings care and operational benefits, it can also raise new storage challenges:

    • Sharing data and promoting collaboration across lines of service and locations
    • Supporting real-time, on-demand access to data
    • Ensuring security and interoperability
    • Rapidly deploying modern IT platforms to support new clinical and business workloads
    • Meeting evolving regulations and data retention requirements

Dell Technologies unstructured data solutions (UDS) enable you to drive healthcare and modern transformation initiatives forward with confidence by delivering reliable, performant, and cost-effective solutions.

Dell Unstructured Data Solutions 

With Dell Unstructured Data Storage Solutions, healthcare and life sciences organizations can leverage easy-to-manage, unified storage systems that work and scale across multiple operational platforms and locations. Our UDS portfolio is designed to meet the unique needs of unstructured data, offering healthcare and life sciences organizations options that address many factors, including data capacity, data types, growth rates, fault tolerance, compute infrastructure, and others.

In addition, our robust ecosystem of healthcare partners and integration with leading medical vendors, including Fuji, Change Healthcare, Epic, GE Healthcare and Philips, ensure that solutions are tested, validated and certified to support modern applications and infrastructure. Together, we have helped more than 1,200 healthcare customers across the globe move at the speed of technology with infrastructure solutions that are: 

Flexible – Choose from all-flash, hybrid and archive nodes for the best fit for data, run multiple data protocols with simultaneous access to avoid storage silos, or deploy as a NAS appliance, in APEX or in the Cloud.

Scalable – Scale up, down or out non-disruptively to tens of petabytes and manage storage infrastructure with a single UI with CloudIQ.

Secure – With intelligent and proactive threat detection and data isolation, Dell Superna Ransomware Defender/ Air Gap solutions address key business problems associated with the protection and security of unstructured data.

    • Defender is a highly scalable real-time event processing solution that provides User Behavior Analytics to detect and halt a ransomware attack on business-critical data stored on Dell Technologies PowerScale storage clusters.
    • Dell Superna AirGap offers vault isolation for customers that require the highest level of data security by building on the security of AirGap Basic to leverage a controlling AirGap agent that is on an isolated network. This agent has components of both Ransomware Defender and Eyeglass and ensures the secure transfer of data and the network isolation of the vault PowerScale cluster.

Innovation ready – Build an integrated and optimized IT infrastructure for AI initiatives, from proof of concept (POC) to production, or support next-generation environment to accelerate whole-genome sequencing, the portfolio is designed around the innovation needs of healthcare.

Cloud ready – Power your most demanding unstructured healthcare data workloads in the public cloud.

Tested and validated – Our dedicated healthcare lab capabilities help healthcare customers accelerate time to solution adoption with validated and certified workflows.

Discover how Dell UDS and our partner ecosystem are helping customers modernize healthcare infrastructure to support better patient outcomes and tomorrow’s health tech innovations.

Louie Correa

About the Author: Louie Correa

Louie Correa is a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of the Unstructured Data Solutions team with Dell Global Channel. In this role, he is accountable for the company's strategy, formulation, development, and cross-functional delivery of the Unstructured Data portfolio. Prior to his role leading the Unstructured Data channel team, Louie was the lead architect for the Unstructured Data solution team across many segment lines of customers, including media & entertainment, e-Discovery, life science, and security to name a few. He is a results-driven leader with a comprehensive background in managing large geographically dispersed strategic accounts, including experience working with operations teams to implement best practices and planning for critical projects across diverse industries. He has a proven ability to identify best-fit vendors and technology solutions, as well as being capable of facilitating communication between technology and business groups. He excels in a demanding, fast-paced environment. Louie's previous positions before joining ISILON/DELL include Director of IT at one of the leaders in e-Discovery firms in the Americas. With functional oversight of the day-to-day operation of the IT groups within the organization. Prior to this role, Louie was accountable for the technical oversight of one of the top talent agency firms in Los Angles as a director of IT. Louie held numerous leadership roles in engineering and operation, including lead architect, SR System Engineer at City National Bank. Louie is a proven leader with more than 22 years of experience in managing diverse product portfolios and strategies and working closely with channel partners to drive product innovation.