Data Management Glossary
Digital Pathology Data Management
According to the Digital Pathology Association:
“Digital pathology is a dynamic, image-based environment that enables the acquisition, management and interpretation of pathology information generated from a digitized glass slide.”
Healthcare organizations have shifted to digital media for medical imaging. Digital pathology, digital PACS and VNA systems are all generating and now storing petabytes of medical imaging data—lab slides, X-rays, MRIs, CT scans and more. These ever-expanding datasets are pushing the limitations of data storage systems and challenging IT department’s ability to effectively manage data. And with increasing regulations, healthcare providers typically must retain medical imaging files for many years. In addition to compliance requirements, clinical researchers may also need access to the data indefinitely. They also typically need access to the unstructured data immediately. The potential future value of this ever-expanding data repository must be weighed against the growing financial and overall unstructured data management costs.
The Digital Pathology Data Management Challenge
Data center storage for large image files is expensive – typically costing millions a year for some organizations on expensive NAS devices. Not only is NAS expensive, but its data must also be secured, replicated and backed up, which typically triples the costs. Meanwhile, in most cases, imaging data is rarely accessed after a few days or weeks. To get greater flexibility and manage data storage costs, healthcare organizations are adopting unstructured data management software to tier cold medical imaging data out of expensive storage to cost-effective environments such as the cloud. Data management decisions can be difficult internally with politics, vendor relationships and long-standing institutional perspectives. Health systems are handling sensitive patient information and tolerance for downtime is usually quite low.
There are many benefits from augmenting medical imaging solutions with data management software that transparently tiers cold data from your data storage and backups.
Komprise has many customers in the healthcare industry dealing with multiple petabytes of file and object data.