INTELLIGENT VERTICAL: HEALTHCARE
“
imaging technology is providing reams of
data to support diagnosis.
For example, by combining information on
a patient’s lifestyle with data on their DNA
structure, hereditary abnormalities in the
family and heart rate and blood pressure,
steps can be taken to prevent certain
illnesses altogether or help doctors prescribe
medication or lifestyle changes that are
precisely and fully focused on the physiology
of that single patient. These new innovations,
and the data they generate, are increasingly
helping medical professionals deliver
significantly improved patient outcomes.
However, enabling all of this data to be
accessed in the right time, in the right place
and in the right format is a significant IT
challenge. Estimates suggest that the vast
majority of all data in an organisation
is unstructured. To enable healthcare
providers to benefit from this data, IT is
increasingly looking towards advanced
real-time analytics and ‘deep learning’ using
advanced technologies, such as artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to
support the processing and delivery of data.
There’s no doubt that these technologies
provide incredible advantages across a
“
TO ENABLE
HEALTHCARE
PROVIDERS TO
BENEFIT FROM
THIS DATA, IT IS
INCREASINGLY
LOOKING
TOWARDS
ADVANCED REAL-
TIME ANALYTICS
AND ‘DEEP
LEARNING’.
94
INTELLIGENTCIO
IT HAS EVOLVED
TO BECOME
A STRATEGIC
ELEMENT WITHIN
HEALTHCARE.
Christian Putz, Director, Emerging, EMEA,
Pure Storage
wide range of industries. In healthcare, the
application of real-time analytics can help to
detect and diagnose diseases faster, reduce
time-to-treatment, lower costs and eventually
lead to better patient care and outcomes.
We’ve seen the potential impact of this
with the AMPLab at UC Berkeley, which
developed a real-time analytics engine
to analyse genetic make-up. This analysis
allows doctors to deliver medicine which
is more precisely tailored towards each
patient. By combining this engine with
flash storage, the lab has also significantly
reduced the time needed to sequence data-
intensive DNA samples and analyse results.
As a result, researchers and clinicians can
generate valuable new insights and, in
some cases, deliver faster answers to life-
and-death questions.
But implementing advanced real-time
analytics or an AI project isn’t that simple.
Huge amounts of data needs to be processed
and analysed at speed, in order to make the
split-second decisions that the technology is
capable of. As a result, these projects need
a very solid infrastructure and significant
compute power to work effectively.
Traditional data centres for healthcare
organisations have done reasonably well in
terms of enabling healthcare practitioners
to deliver patient care. But they were never
built with the intention of running the
demanding data applications now being
used. The future with these applications, AI
and machine learning, requires a different
approach to data centre infrastructure; an
approach with a particular focus on storage,
designed to deliver massively-parallel access
to data at a very high bandwidth.
But here’s the dilemma, how do healthcare
organisations do this while dealing with
constrained budgets? The answer lies in
flash. An all-flash data platform, purpose
built for modern analytics and deep learning
can enable healthcare organisations to
realise the potential of AI faster and on
a far smaller footprint than traditional
infrastructure for high-performance
computing would provide.
According to the PwC research I cited
earlier, 33% of Middle East respondents
believe that advanced computers/robots,
coupled with AI can make a diagnosis faster
and more accurately and 29% believe
that it will help make better treatment
recommendations. However, for this to be a
reality, healthcare providers, in the region,
today require a data platform that enables
them to deploy a new class of applications,
to extract new insights from data and to do
so in real-time.
By ensuring innovations like AI and
advanced analytics are supported from
the data centre level up, they should be
able to run operations with cloud-like
agility, improve the economics of data
analytics at high velocity and scale, and
derive new insights to deliver data-driven
patient outcomes and results not possible
before. Ultimately, by transforming how the
organisation can handle and process data,
IT teams will enable practitioners to deliver
the best level of integrated care possible, to
more people. n
www.intelligentcio.com