Store more: data storage trends

Health Management Technology, Sept, 1997 by Jim Evans

For decades, data storage capacity was a scarce and expensive commodity. Today, it is plentiful and affordable, and as a result, health care IT professionals can concentrate on finding new ways to use clinical and financial data rather than finding a home for it.

The personal computer industry helped drive down the cost of data storage on disk, says Dave Coombs, vice president of storage marketing for Maynard, Mass.-based Digital Equipment Corp. "It drove storage into a volume commercial business... This marked a complete and total shift in how people thought about storage."

Indeed, analysts cite "Moore's Law" -- that the quantity of information that can be stored on a chip of given size doubles every year -- or "Parkinson's Law of Data" -- memory usage doubles every 18 months, while the memory density a dollar can buy doubles every 12 months -- as the Two Commandments of data storage.

"Historically, this has applied to disk storage as well," says Jim Klein, a health care research director with the Gartner Group, Wakefield, Mass. He estimates that there has been a thousand-fold decrease in the price of disk drive memory today compared to the price 15 to 16 years ago. According to Klein, in 1983 10 megabytes of disk storage cost approximately $1,000; today five gigabytes (5 billion bytes) can go for $500 or less. In that equation, today $1 will buy 10 MB of disk storage that in the early 1980s cost $1,000.

"Even in the early 1990s storage was considered a valuable resource," says Coombs. "In the IT room one of the key issues concerning data storage had always been resource management, where outside consultants or in-house staff were asking `How do we minimize the amount of storage being used?' Many processes were designed to determine what data was needed because data storage was very expensive."

The pattern for IS departments was to just store what they had to and migrate data out as quickly as possible when no longer needed, says Coombs.

"Today storage is not a scarce resource," he says. "It's consumable, and IS departments don't need to spend a lot of money to store data. They just buy more when they need it."

The affordability of disk drive memory is having a profound effect on the optical disk and juke box markets, Klein says. While optical disk technology offers tremendous densities for a low price, its Write Once, Read Many (WORM) format and slower access times limit its role in the data storage arena, he believes.

"Even the folks in document storage are using magnetic storage technologies more, reserving optical disks for deep archiving," Klein says. "Disk memory keeps more of the iceberg above water, so to speak, because it has become dramatically less expensive." Retrieval speeds are also faster, making it possible to incorporate more clinical data into an electronic format, he says.

Health care storage needs

As data storage becomes less an issue of cost and space, IT departments can spend more time looking for new ways to use data.

The HIMSS/Hewlett-Packard Leadership survey of 1,200 participants at the 1996 HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition indicated that 65 percent of the respondents planned on more than doubling their data storage requirements by 1998. Twenty-one percent said they planned to increase their data storage up to twice the current requirements and 13 percent predicted increases by about half. Only two percent of those surveyed believed their data storage requirements would remain the same.

"The ability to have more data available for physicians and health plan administrators at the right time and place is absolutely essential in today's health care delivery environment," says Bernie Harris, program manager at Hewlett-Packard. "Storing patient information, ensuring its confidentiality, maintaining its integrity and providing rapid access to vital data are necessary requirements in delivering high quality, cost effective health care services."

However, as new uses for data increase, new complexities are beginning to surface.

The ability to acquire, store, aggregate, retrieve and disseminate data in health care has been a serious issue for years and is only getting worse, according to Bill Reed, senior executive chief information officer and administrative officer of Olsten Health Services, Melville, N.Y.,

"The intensity of the issue along the health care continuum is following the transition within health care in general," says Reed. "That is, initially, the major focus was in inpatient facilities. As health care migrated to an ambulatory environment, so did the data needs. Now, with home health playing an increasingly prominent role, the data needs are surfacing there. Additionally, each step along the path leads to a less controlled environment: hospital to multiple clinics to patients' homes. Exacerbating the issues are the changes in information technology. Although n-tiered client-server architectures offer many significant advantages, they also come burdened with many management issues concerning data storage and access."