Why All-Flash Storage Is the Perfect Choice for Your Digital Healthcare System

It’s not a new thing to use ICT solutions to provide digital health services, prevent disease, and improve quality of life. The only question is when, not if, digital healthcare will transform conventional software, hardware, and services.

So, what is digital healthcare? You have probably heard of, seen, or even worn wearable medical devices – think heart rate monitors, exercise apps, sweat meters (for diabetes), and oximeters (for oxygen in the blood). Wearables are just one example under the umbrella of digital healthcare. According to Food and Drug Administration (FDA), digital healthcare covers mobile health (mHealth), health information technology (IT), wearable devices, telehealth and telemedicine, and personalized medicine.

Digital technologies are reshaping the healthcare landscape, providing huge potential to enable accurate diagnosis and treatments, and enhance the delivery of health care for individuals anywhere, and every time. Digital technology facilitates personalized patient care for medical organizations, helping construct interconnected systems and processes for both patients and medical staff at greater efficiency and accuracy.

In recent years, the global pandemic has put healthcare under the spotlight, and further fueled speculation about the digital transformation of the healthcare sector. At the peak of the pandemic, the number of patients in hospital every day usually surpassed the maximum treatment capacity of each hospital. This not only overwhelmed most departments, but was hindered by traditional ICT infrastructure, which is incapable of fast and accurate diagnosis. As we see the light at the end of the tunnel, many in the healthcare industry believe it is time for digital transformation.

Storage: The key to digital healthcare

Typically, a medical or healthcare organization (say a hospital) is equipped with diverse medical systems and devices, such as the Hospital Information System (HIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). This kind of environment generates massive amounts of data every day. From medical intake forms and online bookings to clinicians’ notes, prescriptions, lab test results and diagnostic imaging, every patient amasses a sizeable e-health record. What’s more, data will only continue to grow as hospitals embrace wearable devices and personalized medicine.

Performance

Take the HIS—the core to a hospital’s IT system—for instance. It hosts critical services like registration, pricing, billing, and prescriptions, and contributes to the management of personnel, equipment, and the finance department. The huge growth in user and hospital data means that healthcare organizations need faster storage performance and higher processing speeds at low latency. However, a common problem is that during peak hours (10:00-12:00 and 15:00-17:00), the conventional HIS can be unresponsive, with each operation taking at least 30 seconds, impacting patient experience. Also, a lot of hospitals run virtual machines and physical database servers on separate storage systems, complicating O&M and networking. To improve patient experience, storage that can provide greater performance and simple O&M is required.

Data security

According to the 2021 Unit 42 Ransomware Threat Report, healthcare was the most targeted vertical sector for ransomware in 2020. The report noted that ransomware likely targeted healthcare organizations due to enormous pressure caused by COVID-19. Ransomware encrypts or steals victim’s data and makes computers or specific files unusable or unreadable. Then a ransom is demanded to recover the computer or decrypt the encrypted file. Moreover, ransomware types are constantly evolving, and often evade common antivirus software. To keep privacy data safe, a data storage solution that provides data encryption, WORM, and secure snapshot features is essential.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado: All-flash storage for a secure digital healthcare platform

Huawei OceanStor Dorado NVMe All-Flash Storage systems consolidate storage resources for virtualized and physical hosts, delivering 21 million IOPS at just 0.05 ms latency. Powered by advanced technologies including NVMe over Fabric, active-active mirroring, and proprietary intelligent network modules, the Huawei OceanStor Dorado base helps healthcare operators develop a digital health platform and slash Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by 50%. It offers the following benefits:

• Resource consolidation: Huawei OceanStor Dorado systems consolidate storage resources for both the virtualized and physical hosts, allowing management on a single interface.
• State of the art technology: 2100 million IOPS at an ultra-low latency of 0.05 ms is delivered thanks to end-to-end NVMe, active-active mirroring, and self-developed intelligent network modules.
• Integrated virtualization: Huawei OceanStor Dorado virtualizes and takes over legacy storage systems, effortlessly facilitating migration of critical workloads from redundant infrastructure to the lighting-fast Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage.
• High reliability protection for storage: The Huawei ransomware protection solution builds a highly secure protection system with primary and backup storage. After data enters the production storage (such as the Huawei OceanStor Dorado), a safe zone is created inside the storage, preventing tampering or deletion using the secure snapshot and Write Once Read Many (WORM) features. An independent physically-isolated zone is also created, combining with air gap technology to automatically disconnect replication links and replicate data to the isolation zone for enhanced protection.

Thinking purchasing all flash storage for your healthcare system? Then think Huawei OceanStor Dorado.

Read more about Huawei’s Connected Healthcare solutions.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.