Recently, Fortune’s “Brainstorm Health” event gathered executives from the Cleveland Clinic, Google, Pfizer, Geisinger Health System and the dean of Stanford Medicine to discuss why measuring health data matters. Their conclusion? More data doesn’t necessarily equate to better outcomes. For that to happen, the wealth of information needs to be housed in one key place: the cloud. And companies need to support data mining, management, and interoperability. Data, data, everywhere Industry analysts estimate the amount of health data produced in 2020 will be a whopping 2,314 exabytes by 2020, an increase of approximately 48% annually. It’s also expected that, by 2020, at least a third of all data (from all industries) will pass through the cloud. While the road to useful and actionable information is speeding up across many disciplines, health data lags behind other industries mainly due to challenges such as privacy of health information, security, and siloed data. Other adverse factors in the healthcare space include the diversity in format, type and context that makes health records difficult to merge into conventional databases. Thus, having structured and unstructured data in multiple places creates silos of information that don’t always play well with other systems and makes sharing the information more challenging. While the challenges are steep, the benefits of a data science strategy in healthcare are promising. There are opportunities to gain insights into wider care processes, to share patient information with clinicians and improve quality and efficiency, and to create learning communities which could help predict outcomes and identify specific areas for improvement. Legacy data management supports big data Our team is in the field daily with organizations that are refining and managing the mountains of information they are required to retain. We see, and are a part of, the critical decisions about how to ensure the information is accurate, available and secure for years to come. At Harmony Healthcare IT, our mission is to preserve vital information to improve lives. We do that with our HealthData Archiver® solution, which delivers cost-savings, information access and transaction posting benefits. It also fortifies defenses against cyberattack by providing a single and secure storage place for disparate silos of legacy data. If you’re a healthcare IT leader looking to replace multiple existing EHR or ERP systems, talk to us about a lifecycle data management strategy that could help your team achieve your big data goals. We’re ready to help preserve the data in your care that is required and necessary to improve lives. Connect with us.