Governments, private and public health care organisations are taking action after the learnings from the pandemic, to increase data quality and equality.

Lack of technology isn’t the problem. There are more technological solutions available than ever. Technologies and solutions like cloud, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), sensors, and mobile technology can help improve health outcomes. There may be need for organisational, financial and governance changes to drive this change internally and through the ecosystem.

'Break the silos' has been a tag line in data management for a long time, and COVID-19 showed it needs to become reality.

Interconnectivity and interoperability are becoming essential, if you want to access the data needed to speed up diagnoses and make real-time decisions.

Therefore, you need a comprehensive plan. The requirements for storage and data management are changing. Data needs to be available, interchangeable, protected, secured, and managed wherever it is stored. Data needs to be captured from every possible location—at the edge, at the core, in the cloud, on premises, or on mobile devices. Images cannot be locked in silos, because silos prevent real-time AI access. Data scientists should not be spending most of their time creating datasets manually and enhancing data quality. Data is knowledge, and it needs to be available quickly to everyone who needs it.

NetApp has been innovative for years with its comprehensive data fabric approach to data. A data fabric approach encompasses everything you need to store, manage, protect, and secure data through its lifecycle, wherever data lives during its lifecycle. A hybrid data strategy, that deploys and connects data on premises and in the cloud, or a cloud only approach are available options.

Knowledge (data) silos for departments, hospitals, clinics, laboratories, digital health devices, diagnostic centres, and medical record vendors create a disconnected healthcare experience and limit new healthcare solutions from evolving. To adapt from a silo approach takes a team effort—an effort between public services, healthcare organisations, IT departments, and clinicians. This can result in huge benefits by making data more fluid and accessible outside of those silos, according to Stephan Schmitt, EMEA healthcare and life science principal technologist at global tech firm NetApp.

“Silos bring costs, silos are inefficient, silos are islands,” argues Schmitt. “If you want to use data in the future, for example for AI, you need to make the data accessible out of the existing silos for more services. This is where NetApp can bring a huge benefit on premise, in the cloud or somewhere in between,” according to Schmitt.

NetApp’s cloud-first strategy helps in responding to the changing business demands. Its data fabric strategy makes it easier to manage and migrate existing data and file structures from on premise to the cloud and back again.

As well as working with many hospitals throughout Europe, NetApp has recently been involved in a cloud-first project with medtech partner, Siemens Healthineers to centralise the data needed to build its products.

The initiative migrated application data and file shares to Microsoft’s Azure cloud service using NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, a software-defined storage offering that delivers data management for file and block workloads.

This solution allows organisations to optimise their cloud storage costs and increase application performance while enhancing data protection, security, and compliance.

More than just storage

One of the major benefits of moving to cloud-based services is that it prevents the need to migrate data whilst hardware or software infrastructure change. Although NetApp is offering this migration free platform on prem for years. Applications evolve, micro services grow, the suite of new applications and methodology can be fully utilised. 

“It’s more than just storing and securing data, you need to be able to transport the data, make it available across additional players, have different tiers of storage and different layers of the infrastructure,” says Wackers.

“If we look at healthcare, the life cycle of the data is an important factor. Some results of studies need to be stored for the lifetime of a patient or even longer for research without application impact due to migrations.  

One example is the use of object storage. “Data gets a primary key (ticket number) and whenever you need that dataset or information, you just need to know the primary key and the system will get it for you,” continues Wackers. “When you move data between different tiers and different cloud providers, it is managed in the object management layer. That makes it much easier to incorporate data sets into applications.”

Preparing for cyber-attacks

Recent high profile ransomware attacks have highlighted the vital need to protect sensitive data.

“You see horror stories every day. Even governments get hacked or attacked by ransomware, so it’s not something that you 100% can avoid,” says Wackers. “A lot of our larger customers are saying it's not a matter of will we be attacked, it's more a matter of when will we be attacked and how well will we be prepared?”

He adds that it is vital to educate staff, so they know how to deal with malicious emails and malware.

“Most of the ransomware comes in through an email which somebody opens and tries to look at. You need to make people aware of how to detect and avoid getting ransomware into the system,” adds Wackers. “Then as an IT department, you need to be aware of what can happen and how to protect against it. Avoiding getting attacked or getting ransomware in your organisation is one thing, but you also need to be prepared for the worst-case scenario.”

As well as standard security services and enhanced data protection technologies from NetApp utilising AI to detect suspicious behaviour, Wackers advocates data protection and working closely with IT staff to recover quickly to a certain point in time.

Moving towards preventative care

“We see some adoption of cloud in healthcare, but it's not going as fast as in other industries,” Wackers explains. “Moving data, and specifically medical outside of the data centre is challenging, so this is where a lot of healthcare organisations will need help or guidance.”

One of the barriers to healthcare adoption in Europe is unclear and ever changing legislation, but despite this Wackers recommends that businesses consider their long-term vision and make sure they are “cloud ready” for the future by ensuring products they purchase are ready for cloud adoption.

As far as Wackers is concerned it is important to have as much health data available and accessible, enabling collaboration and marking a shift away from 'sick care' to a proactive and preventative care.

“It’s time to realise the importance of protecting people from getting sick rather than taking care of them when they are sick. I think that's where the interoperability of data becomes important,“ advises Wackers. “For example, there are a lot of wearables available which can monitor people, but there's discussion about which ones are accurate enough to trust and can be made accessible to care providers”.

Wackers concludes: “It's all about getting the information and being as best prepared as possible. We need to open our minds because technology-wise I don't see any barriers. The ecosystem, departments and research organisations need to open up and collaborate, and that's where interoperability comes in. The more open standards that are defined for datasets, the easier it will be able to use AI to get to faster decisions.”

The overriding message is that we use human knowledge, combined with technological advancement and speed up the adoption and move to more collaborative and preventative health care.