• All business and clinical data within the organization should be accessible via a centralized content repository or content store. While this seems obvious, it is important to understand that "inside the enterprise" no longer simply means within the walls of the hospital or data center. Organizational data boundaries have been extended by mobile and edge devices that could easily be a thousand miles away from the organization's physical location.  A centralized content repository that is "aware" of all enterprise data creation and exchanges will help to corral all healthcare data, whether at a nurse's station in the ER or from a physician's smartphone, which happens to be on vacation with him in Europe. Again, a centralized content repository will require both a policy that mandates any and all clinical data pass through it, and also technology that makes this possible without hindering workflows or the convenience and advantages of using mobile devices in hospitals, clinics, offices and labs. 

• Finally, to support compliance or eDiscovery in the event of a breach or in response to legal action, it is immensely advantageous to have indexed searching capabilities that support your organization's dark data. Along with centralized data management and a content store that extends to the edge, indexed search capabilities provide an important fail-safe for managing or recalling dark data. Whether the data you or your legal department is interested in is contained in an email or a file on a laptop or desktop or out on the network, it should be easily searchable. This level of simplified self-service access is, of course, only realistic if the data has been centrally managed and kept within an enterprise-encompassing data content store.     

Dark data is already here and isn't going anywhere, if it wasn't for mobile and edge devices everything would still reside in the data center. Physicians have already adopted mobile technology such as tablets and smartphones, and as far as they are concerned it is up to IT to think ahead and address issues associated with analytics, compliance and maintenance of the subsequent data. It is technology that has created this mass of dark data and it is technology that can bring it back to light. It is now up to technology innovators and vendors, in combination with IT departments, to continue to solve forward to ensure the proper management of what many are now considering healthcare's most valuable asset  -  its data. 

Jay Savaiano, director of Healthcare Business Development at CommVault, heads CommVault's healthcare business development activity in North America.