Gaining Insights Through Infrastructure

Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure

Today’s healthcare organizations face unprecedent changes on numerous fronts due to disruptive market forces. New and evolving business models focused on value-based health are changing how care is delivered and reimbursed.

Executive Summary

Advances in precision medicine, genomics and imaging, along with widespread adoption of electronic health records and the proliferation of medical IoT and mobile devices, are resulting in an exponential explosion of structured and unstructured data. To glean insights from these large complex data sets, healthcare organizations are investing in high-performance systems that support cognitive workloads.

Legacy infrastructure simply cannot keep up with the pace of change. Forward-thinking healthcare organizations are modernizing their infrastructure by deploying data-driven multicloud storage and software-defined infrastructure because it ensures the highest level of data availability, reliability and cost efficiency. The benefits of storage and software-defined infrastructure accrue not only to IT, but to clinicians and researchers through the increased ability to access data and collaborate across the globe. Multicloud storage architecture enables workloads to be deployed to the appropriate environment—private, public, dedicated or hybrid cloud—increasing the speed to value and insights. Thus, multicloud storage and software-defined infrastructure is the platform of choice for new cognitive initiatives that are driving successful digital transformation, and ultimately improving patient care and outcomes.

Healthcare Organizations Face Unprecedented Change Driven by Disruptive Market Forces

The healthcare industry of the future will be shaped by those organizations that are early to digitally transform themselves by ensuring a state of technological readiness for modernizing their IT infrastructure.

The following drivers will accelerate the need for future-ready, data-driven, multicloud storage and software-defined infrastructure.

• Digital transformation: Technological change altering business and society
• Human vs. machine: The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation
• Sense, compute, actuate: The new data-centric paradigm
• Cyberthreats: Theft, ransom and cyberattacks on the rise
• Consumer expectations: More convenience, choice, customization and control
• Sustainability: Rising cost and illness burden

Volume of Electronic Health Data Has Exploded Due to Investment in Healthcare IT and Medical Advances

To support new business and reimbursement models, IT needs to be agile, flexible, scalable and reliable. Greater adoption of cloud, mobile, big data and analytics will help to enable greater innovation in cognitive healthcare. In turn, these initiatives will generate unprecedented growth in data—both structured and unstructured—requiring investment in new storage models and software-defined infrastructure.

60.6% of providers increased their IT budgets in 2017 to replace outdated technology.

Source: 2017 Vertical IT & Communications Survey, IDC, April, 2017

Healthcare providers have fully embraced the Internet of Things (IoT) with 72.7% of respondents having deployed an IoT solution and the remainder piloting or researching using IoT.

Source: Global IoT Survey, IDC, September, 2017

By the end of 2020, 25% of data used in medical care will be collected and shared with healthcare systems by the patients themselves (“bring your own data”).

Source: IDC 2018. From our 2018 FutureScape for Health

Cognitive Healthcare Is Making Healthcare Intelligent

73: the number of days it takes for medical data to double by 2020.

1,200TB: Lifetime data volume generated by a typical consumer.

80% of the world’s healthcare data is unstructured.

A Modern Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure Creates the Agile IT Environment Required for Digital Transformation

The enterprise IT infrastructure market is undergoing a once-in-a-generation change due to ongoing digital transformation and the impact of cloud computing. Demand is on the rise for technologies and architectures that can lower costs while improving levels of operational efficiency, which has driven strong growth for solutions such as software-defined compute, software-defined storage and software-defined networking.

Why Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure?

Storage and software-defined infrastructure offers healthcare enterprises a way to deploy, manage, and refresh IT with an eye to increasing operational efficiencies, supporting cognitive health initiatives, and reducing costs.

• Flexibility: Capabilities are extracted from the underlying hardware allowing IT to deploy on any hardware and free data from hardware constraints.
• Automation: Orchestration software automates provisioning and configuration of IT services.
• Optimization: Analytics and monitoring of current conditions identifies which resources will provide the best support for actual needs.
• Efficiencies: Smarter, self-aware and self-optimizing systems cut deployment processes from weeks to minutes.
• Lower costs: Moving workloads to the cloud, combined with better use of IT staff resources, results in lower IT costs and better performance.

Healthcare IT Organizations Are Embracing Cloud Computing to Respond Quickly to New IT and Business Requirements

The adoption of hybrid cloud is increasing in healthcare and providing a path to value for IT and clinicians alike.

A data-driven multicloud storage and software-defined infrastructure architecture provides healthcare IT departments the flexibility to move workloads efficiently and in a cost-effective manner to the appropriate cloud environment—private, public, dedicated or hybrid cloud—increasing the speed to value when healthcare organizations are pursuing new initiatives.

Top 3 Reasons Healthcare Provider Organizations Are Investing in Cloud Computing.

• 49.1% Improved manageability and less maintenance
• 45.3% Lower cost of service
• 45.0% Get applications up and running faster

N = 253 Source: 2017 Industry IT & Communications Survey, IDC Customer Insights and Analysis, April, 2017

IT Professionals Benefit From Deploying Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure

A more modern storage and software-defined infrastructure provides the healthcare IT organization greater flexibility and operational efficiency.

Automated provisioning and orchestration frees IT resources to focus on innovation rather than maintenance. Workloads can be dynamically moved into a multicloud environment allowing IT to respond quickly to new technology and business requirements thus accelerating the speed to value for digital transformation initiatives. CIOs will be able to play a more strategic role and work more closely with lines of business (LoB).

Healthcare Professionals Also Benefit From Storage and Software-Defined Infrastructure

Increased access to data improves care.

A more modern storage and software-defined infrastructure breaks down data siloes and improves secure access to data across the ecosystem and the globe to support worldwide research efforts. It also helps to increase the speed to insights that can help researchers accelerate discoveries and get to answers faster.

Challenge and Opportunity

The market challenges that IBM and its customers face can also present opportunities given the company’s strong healthcare experience and a broad product portfolio of storage and software-defined infrastructure solutions.

The healthcare industry is undergoing a significant transformation as reimbursement shifts from fee-for-service to value-based outcomes in the face of regulatory uncertainty.

The market for storage and software-defined infrastructure is highly competitive. Most healthcare organizations are at the early stages of their IT modernization initiatives.

IBM provides market-proven solutions that are scalable and future ready, and are backed by a strong worldwide support capability and IBM professional services.

Key Takeaways

• Traditional legacy IT infrastructure will not support the digital transformation initiatives required to survive and even thrive in today’s rapidly evolving healthcare environment. Storage and software-defined infrastructure provides the foundation upon which to deliver new IT services, including cognitive initiatives to meet the demands of today, and more importantly, the future.
• The benefits of storage and software-defined infrastructure accrue not only to IT departments, but also to clinicians, and ultimately patients. Key benefits include greater IT efficiencies and lower IT costs. Breaking down data siloes enables wider clinician collaboration, deeper clinical insights and improved patient outcomes.
• Proliferation of structured and unstructured data from disparate internal and external sources, combined with data growing exponentially in size and complexity, drives the need for a robust data architecture and dynamic, and highly-scalable storage models including software-defined storage and data-driven multicloud storage.
• A strong partnership with a strategic technology supplier is essential for successfully navigating digital transformation in healthcare. Healthcare organizations should look for partners with a combination of solid next-generation technology solutions and strong advisory services.