Intelligent Health.tech Issue 11 | Page 69

S C R U B B I N G U P challenge to store data in an efficient and useful way for clinicians .
In this context of data explosion , it is necessary to have storage which offers sufficient performance and capacity to cope with this data explosion and deliver personalised medicine at scale .
Flash technology paves the way for next-generation personalised medicine
In the face of these challenges , traditional storage technologies are outdated and obsolete , with hard disk drives consuming too much power , taking up too much space and performing too slowly . Legacy technology is unable to cope with the explosion of data and the need for fast , large-scale analysis . Overcoming these obstacles is now essential for hospitals and medical facilities if they want to provide a personalised medicine service to their patients . There are some flash solutions that can meet these needs because of their parallelism , low cost , small environmental footprint and low power consumption . The benefits are not only to do with the speed to insight and faster diagnosis – they ’ re about using less energy and taking up less space which is good for the environment and lowers costs .
Two examples illustrate the impact of allflash technology in accelerating genomic analysis capabilities : With Pure Storage , the Swiss Health 2030 Genome Center has made its genomic data analysis available to clinicians ten times faster and since adopting Pure Storage ’ s solutions , has doubled the speed of transferring large data from the sequencing platform to researchers . The Australian Genome Research Facility ( AGRF ) has accelerated its projects by 86 %, including a six-fold increase in the speed of pre-analysis of genomic data since it began using Pure ’ s solutions .
Future healthcare
Today , the medical sector no longer must wonder whether the technology exists to help it increase its genomic activity for the benefit of patients : flash technology has the capacity to perform large-scale genomic analysis at speed . Legacy spinning disk storage is simply incapable of supporting such an increase in sequencing activity on a daily basis and on a large scale .
The impact for patients of adopting this technology is immediate : they get the most suitable treatment without spending time testing different solutions or medicines . By finding genomics variations in patients , healthcare professionals can directly assess each patient ' s sensitivity to drugs and their effectiveness , so they can prescribe the right treatment for them from the start .
By combining data from multiple diagnostic platforms , like medical imaging and digital pathology , with the results of DNA analysis , the doctor has a complete picture of a patient ’ s information to make an informed decision about the best treatment . This personalised medicine approach is what any patient has the right to expect from a hospital today . �
Omar Akar , Regional Vice President , Middle East & Emerging Africa , Pure Storage
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