More and more hospitals are using the cloud for medical image storage
Radiology has been one of the specialities leading the adoption of cloud storage and cloud computing technology in healthcare. This has largely been driven by the very rapid growth in the number of digital images that need to be stored, and the fact than many health systems are no longer dumping old images and medical records like they used to because they are now valuable in the new age of big data.
This trend was very pronounced at recent Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meetings and at the massive 2023 Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual health IT meeting. To learn more about this trend and what is driving it, Health Imaging spoke with Esteban Rubens, Oracle's healthcare field chief technology officer for healthcare, during HIMSS.
"There is so much data and it is growing so quickly, especially with the addition of things like digital pathology, so people are looking for ways to try and control the growth that they have on-premises. A lot of our customers tell us they don't want to be in the data center business anymore. They may want to keep somethings, but they do not want to continue growing endlessly," he explained.
Growth in imaging has mainly been fueled by the increasing number of digital images that need to be archived. MRI and CT exams consist of hundreds of images each. The movement to digital breast tomosysthesis for mammography is also moving exams from just a few images to 30 or more per exam.
Another big driver to adopt cloud storage has been the movement to enterprise imaging systems, where images and data can be consolidated into one archive to make it easier to share across healthcare systems and between departments. These systems increasingly include images and data from departments across a health system, beyond the traditional radiology and cardiology PACS users.
In the past, hospitals and health systems maintained all data storage on site, but the rapid growth of data has required them to constantly upgrade and enlarge these data centers. There are also added issues of cybersecurity, the need to backup data at remote sites for disaster recovery, and added costs for maintaining, housing and cooling these centers, making them more complex to operate. This has made cloud storage a much more attractive option, at least for archive data and backup data storage.
Old medical images and reports becoming very valuable and need to be saved
Rubens said another contributor to the growing need for data storage in the fact that health systems are no longer purging old images and records. These data are now valuable for big data health studies, analytics, and the rapidly growing area of training artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, which require vast numbers of studies to train and valid them. But the data needs to be stored somewhere.
"Even if they are not doing AI, these are extremely valuable data sources because they have the images along with the metadata, the annotations and the reports. This is a gold mine, so no one wants to get rid of it," Rubens said.
How health organizations are starting with cloud storage
Several healthcare cloud providers Health Imaging spoke with at HIMSS 2022 agreed there is not a single way hospitals are using the cloud. Rubens agreed and said it is all over the board, ranging from some rare health systems wanting to move everything to cloud, and others moving only parts of their data, or using it just for archiving. Even with archiving, he said every health system is different in terms of how old data needs to be before they send to off-site storage in the cloud.
Archive storage is the largest use case and the main entry point for health systems to begin using cloud, Rubens said.
The cloud may help address health IT staffing shortages
With health IT staffing shortages and the ever-growing need for more IT involvement in every aspect across health systems, Rubens said the cloud can help. Outsourcing to the cloud takes some of the burden off their shoulders to given them back more time. He said outsourcing to cloud providers is not about eliminating IT staff, but enabling them to work on things that matter more to the healthcare organization.
"It can help them do their jobs better and operating at the top of their certification. There are some things that are basic that we can take care of, and then they can focus on things that are more interesting or innovations to help their clinicians," Rubens explained. "The problem with all of IT in healthcare is that they spend all their time running around keeping the lights on ... so if you can remove that pressure and off-load it to a cloud provider, all of a sudden you have time to do the things you always wanted to do but could never get to."
Watch the video above for more insights on cloud HIPAA compliance, cybersecurity security and more.
Dave Fornell has covered healthcare for more than 17 years, with a focus in cardiology and radiology. Fornell is a 5-time winner of a Jesse H. Neal Award, the most prestigious editorial honors in the field of specialized journalism. The wins included best technical content, best use of social media and best COVID-19 coverage. Fornell was also a three-time Neal finalist for best range of work by a single author. He produces more than 100 editorial videos each year, most of them interviews with key opinion leaders in medicine. He also writes technical articles, covers key trends, conducts video hospital site visits, and is very involved with social media. E-mail: dfornell@innovatehealthcare.com