“We may see a 30% funding cut this year,” I heard from an IT infrastructure director at one of our healthcare customers recently. Today, many U.S. hospitals are facing a financial crisis due to funding uncertainty, rising operational costs, global supply chain constraints related to tariffs and growing demand for healthcare services.
The numbers are profound: 40% of U.S. hospitals finished 2024 operating at a loss, according to Becker’s Hospital Review and Kaufman Hall. Medicare reimbursement continues to lag behind inflation, covering just 83 cents for every dollar spent by hospitals. This results in over $100 billion in underpayments, according to the AHA.
Meanwhile, healthcare data is growing at 36% annually, which is 6% faster than manufacturing, 10% faster than financial services, and 11% faster than media & entertainment, according to RBC Capital Markets.
Let’s look at a few of the top pressure points happening right now in the U.S. healthcare sector and why unstructured data lies at the heart of these:
Data-driven patient care could save the U.S. healthcare system
Patients aren’t getting any happier with the quality of the care they get along with the high price tag they pay to receive it.
- The U.S. ranked last among the 11 highest-income countries for healthcare delivery across 71 performance metrics, according to the ACS Journal.
- Widespread reforms are necessary, yet data-driven care is the linchpin for addressing high costs, poor quality and suboptimal patient outcomes.
Rampant unstructured data growth and its AI potential
The healthcare industry has come a long way in the past 20 years with digitalization, especially from the widespread use of electronic medical record systems and the proliferation of devices like wearable monitors. Yet all these applications and devices have created an explosion of unstructured data.
Some healthcare organizations are storing, at no small price tag, 50+petabytes of data since this data is retained for decades to meet compliance requirements.
This data is hard to manage and understand yet IT leaders have a new mandate to leverage clinical notes, machine data and images for AI analysis to hopefully improve operations and clinical practice.
Unstructured data poses cyber and compliance risks
Heavy compliance requirements around the collection, storage and protection of PII and PHI are expensive and further erode at competitiveness and innovative practices. Paying to clean up breaches can dig deep into the bottom line. A recent survey from Netwrix found a 400% increase in healthcare cyberattacks costing $200k or more in 2025 over 2024. Unstructured data is most vulnerable to attacks due to its sheer volume and variety.
3 Ways Unstructured Data Management Addresses the Healthcare Financial Crisis
Unstructured data consumes 30% of IT budgets or more and its large volume, massive growth and inherent inefficiencies present untapped opportunity for cost optimization. At the same time, it is the fuel for AI: the most promising innovation in years to battle the many barriers facing healthcare organization survival today.
Komprise is a storage-agnostic unstructured data management solution that is custom-built to deliver cost optimization and secure AI data pipelines to enterprises. We have many large healthcare providers as our customers; they are seeing measurable results from annual storage savings to sensitive data management to data classification and workflows for AI.
Here’s a closer look:
1. Save on Storage + Reduce the Attack Surface
A major hospital in the southeast is saving $2.5M per year by using Komprise to identify and tier cold files from their on-premises file storage to the cloud. Thanks to the nondisruptive nature of Komprise Transparent Move Technology, users and applications continue to access the tiered files from the original location. Learn more about the benefits of Komprise transparent tiering.
Another hospital cut its ransomware attack surface by 75% using Komprise intelligent tiering to immutable storage. File-level tiering, unlike proprietary block-level tiering from storage vendors, removes the entire cold data footprint from the ransomware attack surface. This also reduces backup costs. Learn more about Komprise protection for ransomware.
2. Detect and Protect PHI From Costly Exposure
Komprise gives storage teams the ability to set up workflows using our built-in content scanners or integrations with third-party AI scanners, to discover and take action on sensitive data such as PII and PHI that has been copied or moved to an insecure location.
Beyond regulatory compliance such as HIPAA, Komprise can ingest data into AI with proper sensitive data handling and automated auditing. This avoids patient data leakage to public LLMs, a catastrophic outcome for any healthcare organization. Learn more about Komprise Sensitive Data Management and Komprise AI Ingest.
3. Collaborate with Researchers, Clinicians on AI
A major research hospital tripled their savings by increasing the data tiering rate through giving researchers capabilities to search and tag data on completed projects for archiving. Read the case study.
A regional medical system is using Komprise Smart Data Workflows to identify and classify specific pathology images with metadata enrichment and then send to an AI pathology solution. The end goal is to speed up tumor identification while generating more accurate diagnoses. Such collaboration between IT and users can improve patient outcomes, reduce research cycles, and reduce costs.
Solving healthcare’s long-brewing financial crisis will depend upon a complete overhaul of healthcare delivery practices spanning public policy, economics, medical education, consumer behavior and more. Managing and leveraging unstructured data to create clinical and operational efficiencies and uncover new answers to reducing the cost of chronic and preventable conditions will be an integral part of the solution.
Learn more about Komprise unstructured data management for healthcare.
