Healthcare managers increasingly recognize how critical IT and data center transformation is to overall organizational growth. The healthcare industry is constantly involving today. More and more technology-driven solutions to healthcare problems are coming to the fore. This is most noticeable through the prevalence of smartwatches and applications in smartphones that monitor heart rates and other vitals. Even Nokia, the company that was once known as the king of smartphones and the cell phone industry in general, has invested a significant portion of its wealth into healthcare.
The healthcare industry is expected to spend around $2.7 trillion on IT infrastructure this year and will expand its investment in the years to come. Some of this money is going into data centers. The goal is to aggregate data to identify patterns and trends. This will allow medical companies to categorize the data to gain insights into humans’ day to day lives, habits, and activities. Through this, medical companies will be able to see what activities are detrimental and which are essential to our health.
An example of this is the recent study released by Fitbit. The company aggregated 150 billion hours of data and broke it down by country, gender, age, and a myriad of other factors. It allowed them to show which factors affected the Resting Heart Rate (RHR) of various people. RHR of 60-100 beats per minute is considered normal.
Sleep duration was a factor; sleeping too little or too much could affect it drastically. The sweet spot was 7.25 hours. Another finding was that no matter how old you were, you could bring your RHR down through exercise and healthier eating habits.
Insights like these could never have been gleaned at the scale that they were, without the ability to store massive amounts of information. Studies like these are part of a huge change in the way that health services are administered and mean the availability, affordability, and ability of the healthcare system is about to vastly increase in the next decade or so.
Take the other example of the Apple Watch, which is the best selling watch in the world. It, along with several other smartwatches, has allowed doctors to keep constant tabs on their patients that are wearing the watches. They are able to send a constant stream of data about a patient’s vitals to a database.
Along with this, the Apple Watch has been able to alert people multiple times when it senses a sudden, drastic change in a person’s vital signs. It has notably saved the life of a 32-year-old man in New York by forcing him to go to the hospital. He was spared a painful death from an erupted ulcer. Services like these will eventually get better when this is paired with the Internet of Things and smart devices can act on behalf of people in grave medical danger. And all of this is only possible through the mass aggregation of data in data centers.
Data centers will not only help patients and doctors access the information that they receive, but they will also allow people to live healthier lives in the future by analyzing massive amounts of data.
