Healthcare Data and the Longest Movie Ever Made

Healthcare produces data. Lots of it. If it were made into a movie, it would be the longest movie ever made.

Hospitals alone churn out 50 petabytes of data each year, per the World Economic Forum. For context, just one petabyte is a hefty million gigabytes. Our smartphones and laptops don’t come close to that kind of storage capacity.

It’s no wonder that most healthcare data go unused and neglected.

How can we change that? How can we pull insights out of data to build a smarter, more connected future for patients and those who care for them?

So Much Data

The easiest cliché to reach for, in terms of the challenge, is to say that it’s like finding a needle in a haystack, or a dozen needles in a few thousand haystacks. But that doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like watching a movie around the clock for hundreds of years to see it end to end. Manik Gupta cut his teeth on 72 petabytes of network data earlier in his career, and that movie would take 680 years to finish.

Hope the movie’s good.

Fortunately, healthcare has excellent data professionals like Gupta, Rochelle Henderson, and Chad Kanick, who work with data to fill information gaps and draw timely insights. And they’ve been doing this work long before they came to Surescripts.

2 Examples of Peer-Reviewed Articles—Out of Hundreds

Take, for example, the work of Henderson and Grant Scott, whose peer-reviewed articles highlighted below explore two pressing issues of the day in healthcare: (1) insurance coverage of specialty drugs and (2) the patterns and severity of COVID-19 outbreaks.

• Henderson and coauthors examined trends in specialty drug coverage from 2017–2021 and published their peer-reviewed article in Health Affairs Scholar. The study offers insights that could inform payer and provider strategies. Read the study here.
• Scott and coauthors conducted a systematic review on how technology and data analytics can help identify vulnerable populations during outbreaks, focusing on COVID-19, and published their peer-reviewed article in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Read the study here.

When it comes to payer and provider strategies in specialty drug coverage, it’s enough for now to show how much health plans could save with real-time insights. And when it comes to disease outbreaks, geospatial technologies can significantly support the public health response with timely, location-specific insights.

The takeaway from both articles is that there are insights hidden in all these petabytes, waiting to be discovered and used to accelerate data-driven decisions across healthcare.

We’re working to find them.

We’re making sense of the longest movie ever made.