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In 2011 according to reports, data from the U.S. healthcare system alone exceeded 150 exabytes. With the current growth rate, this will soon reach the zettabyte-scale. A value-focused organization based in California has more than 9 million members and is believed to have between 27-44 petabytes of potentially rich data from varied sources.

Lately,  the health sector has been introduced to several new challenges apart from the ones that already existed. Some health systems have been growing phenomenally, while some are being gutted because of decreasing quality and increasing costs. Hundreds of healthcare settings comparable in size and scale often have a huge gap, with some being way ahead, while some left so far behind that all they ever see are losses.

Emma Jones, 67 was diagnosed with Type-2 diabetes and morbid obesity five years ago and had always faced issues managing her HbA1c levels and morbid obesity. Her last test report revealed her HbA1c to be higher than the ideal and her obesity , barely controlled. Emma’s PCPs and specialists knew that the problem was related to her poor adherence to care plans and irregular follow-up visits. Apart from her wellness and health, the secondary concern for the providers was facing the growing emphasis Medicare had placed on overall performance and its link with reimbursements. 

The healthcare industry is swirling with health data, and healthcare has some significant strides in the past few years, right from genome sequencing and precision medicine to public policy and improvements in patient care. Yet the most-coveted, long-term goal remains to be realized- interoperability between health systems: a scenario where every healthcare system would speak the same language, information would flow seamlessly between healthcare organizations, and every organization, system, provider, and patient would have access to relevant clinical information at the right time.

The US healthcare is getting costlier every second. It is already over $3 Trillion dollars annually, which is approximately 18% of the GDP.  This scenario has changed the perspective of everyone about health care. Today, value-based contracts are defining the modern day healthcare. It isn’t about the quantity of the care anymore as much as it is about the quality of the care that is being focused on.

Time is money – an adage world follows. When providers realized paper medical records were time-consuming, Electronic Health Records were developed to make things streamlined. Early EHRs were only meant to capture basic clinical information, and over the time EHRs have taken the form of a digital version of paper medical records. In an industry as dynamic and as focused on value as healthcare, it’s not feasible to have physicians spend almost half their time on EHRs.