Opinion: The invisible wasteland of health care data

As physicians, nothing brightens our faces quite like shutting off our computers. We spend almost two hours of every work day wrestling with the long loading times to view clinical data, the litany of structured data sets we must complete to meet medical billing requirements for innumerable insurance companies, and the nearly endless sea of protected health information we must wade through just to find the piece we need for our patients. 

Ask anyone in this field: The amount of digitalized data in health care alone is staggering. From clinical notes to laboratory results to radiologic images, the types and quantities of medical data are myriad. According to a 2019 report from the World Economic Forum, the average hospital produces approximately 50 petabytes of data per year, with 97% of the data going unused. To put that enormous number in perspective, this is the equivalent of streaming a two-hour movie about 25 million times annually. Multiply that number by the over 6,000 hospitals in the United States, and the amount of data becomes incomprehensibly large. And that report was from five years ago — the numbers are likely even higher now!

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