Worldwide PACS and EMR/EHR Storage Infrastructure 2011-2015 Forecast: The Storage Opportunity Behind Key Healthcare Provider Workloads

This IDC study presents a five-year forecast of the worldwide spending on disk-based storage solutions and software for PACS and EMR/EHR systems from 2011 to 2015.

"One of the factors influencing storage growth in the healthcare provider space is the long-term retention requirements," says Laura DuBois, Program VP. "Retention requirements for PACS images can vary based on state, patient age (adult versus pediatric), and usage (clinical, research, etc.). It is not uncommon for retention requirements for PACS to be decades, and some firms retain PACS images indefinitely. In a recent study, 65% of respondents keep their PACS images forever. These long-term retention requirements influence an increasing amount of storage capacity required to retain these images."

"Increasing adoption of digital imaging along with fast increase in size of the images is another major trend in the healthcare industry, accelerating growth of disk-based storage deployments," says Natalya Yezhkova, research director, Storage Systems. "In the next five years, healthcare will be one of the fastest-growing user segments for enterprise storage systems."