This Monday morning we all awoke to the news that U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 3590, a major health care reform package. Known as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” it aims to ensure that more Americans will be covered by health insurance. It also makes it more difficult for insurance companies to deny coverage. Whatever your views on the debate around this legislation, one thing is clear: this reform shines a light on the many IT and storage challenges associated with the health care industries. On the most basic level, making changes and adding millions to the insured will mean an influx of new paperwork, and that translates to files that must be stored and managed.
As ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn reports, at least one investor, Bill Miller of Legg Mason, is bullish on healthcare IT as a result of this bill. As he sees it, this reform actually gives insurers a boost because it requires a raft of new signups. This will benefit IBM and GE, among many others. It’s easy to forget that a year ago, our industry was in a lather over the fact that President Obama was committing stimulus money to the health care industry for a push to digitize medical records. We are still sorting out the myriad implications of this new mandate, which sets aside nearly $20 billion for the effort. We do know, for example that tech giant Microsoft jumped all over it by introducing something called HealthVault Community Connect–specialized software to manage these records.
Taking a step backwards, the new landscape of medical research has put a strong demand on storage resources. As our blogger Mike Davis reported from a recent “next generation sequencing” conference, the pace of cutting edge genomic research, and the types of files it produces has led to an upsurge in the need for storage capacity. As it happens, Ocarina just put out a case study about the work it’s doing with Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing, which handles a massive influx of genomics files on a daily basis. For the full case study, go to the company Resources page and click on Cornell Case Study (may require signup).
What do you think? Are there storage challenges you or your organization predict as a result of this new legislation? We’d like to hear. The forum (below, in comments) is open!
