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Healthcare and Life Sciences

NetApp for healthcare and life sciences: Serving data at life-saving speed

NetApp delivers industry-leading hybrid-cloud data-management capabilities to the healthcare and life sciences industry. The result is stronger collaboration and more meaningful research, faster time to market for pharmaceuticals and vaccines, more accurate diagnoses, better patient care, more effective resource usage, advances in precision medicine, and substantial cost savings.

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NetApp for healthcare and life sciences

Data is the lifeblood of healthcare and life sciences.

It flows through big pharma, hospitals, treatment centers, insurers, payer-providers, and medical research facilities, and it advances genomics, prescriptive analytics, precision medicine, and many other fields of study. Both public and private healthcare and life sciences organizations generate, store, and analyze data with the goal of improving the products or services they provide.

All of this data requires proper management and analysis to derive meaningful insight. However, much of it is simply being held in silos, often insecurely, and processed manually.

Healthcare and life sciences professionals, plagued by poor data management and legacy infrastructure, are unable to extract full value from the large amounts of siloed data available, and care teams can't access information that could help them reach better diagnoses faster. By bringing together data across hospitals and treatment facilities, research and testing sites, administrative and corporate offices, NetApp's many patented technology solutions and end-to-end view can spot problems and determine what aspects need improvement.

NetApp delivers industry-leading hybrid-cloud data-management capabilities to the healthcare and life sciences industry. The result is stronger collaboration and more meaningful research, faster time to market for pharmaceuticals and vaccines, more accurate diagnoses, better patient care, more effective resource usage, advances in precision medicine, and substantial cost savings.

In today's world of COVID-19, the race is on for faster and more accurate insights. Real-time monitoring and intelligent resource planning, optimal use of equipment, and workflow enhancements can all provide insights that make a real difference when analyzed and acted on appropriately. NetApp data management capabilities will help you extract these critical insights to achieve your goals.

NetApp for healthcare and life sciences overview

Features and Benefits

The capabilities that set NetApp for healthcare and life sciences apart.

Trends Making Innovation Waves

The loosening of FDA (and other governing body) restrictions

In today's COVID-19 reality, the race is on for faster and more accurate insights (as well as the race for a vaccine). The FDA—the U.S. agency that governs drug development, reviews, and approvals—has authorized many pharmaceutical companies to target and accelerate a treatment or vaccine for COVID-19. The FDA is giving approvals and authorizations that they normally would not. A good example of this situation is Illumina, a big player in the genomics space. They are the largest genomic sequencer machine-maker in the world, with roughly 70% of the market. The FDA just gave Illumina a waiver to start doing more COVID-19 diagnostic and detection testing.

Hybrid, multicloud enablement

More big pharma companies, hospitals, and large medical and research facilities are investing in hybrid, multicloud models to reduce costs, increase collaboration between research teams, and avoid delays and outages. Hybrid cloud environments offer flexibility, scalability, agility, and control. You can expand or contract with ease, move workloads to the public cloud, and pull them back on your premises as needed. Additionally, there is substantial growth in genomic cloud services.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) deployment

AI and ML promise more effective ways to recognize disease, crowd source and develop treatment plans, monitor health epidemics and pandemics, increase efficiencies in medical research and clinical trials, and make operations more effective to handle the increased stressors on the healthcare system. The speed that AI and ML provide means that data scientists and researchers can make new discoveries, publish results faster, speed up testing processes, and ultimately help medical practitioners save more lives.

Popular AI and ML Use Cases

Big pharma

Big pharma companies use AI to design drugs as well as to identify the most appropriate drugs for specific conditions, far faster than humans could, while also cutting costs.

Prescriptive Analytics

Prescriptive Analytics improves patient care and health outcomes by using AI to anticipate what will happen, when it will happen, and why it will happen. It also suggests options for taking advantage of future opportunities or mitigating future risks, and shows the implications of each decision option.

Medical imaging

Medical imaging benefits from AI because as computer-aided diagnostics can see and analyze beyond what a human eye can.

Genomics

Genomics uses AI to accelerate analytics, trace and diagnose deadly diseases such as COVID-19 and cancer, speed discovery of illness and disease, and advance precision medicine.

NetApp Differentiators

NetApp Differentiators

We're Agile

NetApp is agile. We are partnered with three major cloud providers – Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure – for service at hyperscale. We solve data challenges with hardware, software, and cloud services, on-premises and in the cloud.

We're secure

We're like bodyguards for your data. Data security is embedded in NetApp technology, whereas competitors offer this feature only as an add-on. We are HIPAA compliant, and although there's still no such thing as GDPR-compliance-in-a-box, our solutions (NetApp Cloud Compliance service, NetApp ONTAP Data Security, and NetApp Cloud Insights) make compliance simpler.

We're available (you should see our dating profile)

Our full-stack AI data and experiment management solution, NetApp AI Control Plane, provides extreme scalability, streamlined deployment, and nonstop data availability, when and where you need it. The AI Control Plane addresses the AI data management needs of the enterprise. Data scientists no longer need to wait for copies of datasets, and your organization no longer has to dedicate so much costly high-performance storage to store many copies of the same data.

We think outside of the box (in the cloud actually)

The NVIDIA and NetApp partnership is a key differentiator in advancing AI, ML, and deep learning (DL) initiatives in healthcare and life sciences. We are the first storage vendor to bring to market an integrated medical-imaging solution based on NVIDIA Clara Train SDK v2.0 with NVIDIA DGX-2 systems and NetApp AFF storage. In addition, NetApp and NVIDIA are delivering AI, ML, and DL solutions that help healthcare and life sciences leaders accelerate AI adoption and manage projects more easily. Our attention to optimizing data pipelines amplifies the rapidly expanding ecosystem of NVIDIA AI hardware and software.

And we partner with the best

Beyond NVIDIA, we have strong partner ties with the top Healthcare & Life Sciences technology providers to ensure seamless solutions for each client. For example: for medical imaging, we partner with industry leaders such as Agfa, Fuji Film, Change, and more. For genomics, we have partnered with PetaGene for technology that decreases the size of genomic data, further reducing both storage costs and data transfer times without compromising data quality. Our solutions are also Epic-, MEDITECH-, and EHR-certified. You can be sure that your applications will run quickly and efficiently, with excellent support. Since 2010, Epic and NetApp have maintained a technical alliance to continuously confirm that our storage systems meet Epic customer requirements. Even Allscripts itself runs Azure NetApp Files on its back end—a testament to our ability to support health information technology (HIT).

Data Management Challenges

In medical research and treatment, collaboration is king

Data, such as genomic or genetic profile data, is often siloed and dispersed across various technologies within a hospital or health system, impeding research, discovery, diagnosis, and treatment. Researchers need to be able to see the whole picture, which often crosses borders and spans large populations. To combat a pandemic—like COVID-19—researchers around the world need to share data.

The challenges of compliance and collaboration

However, when storing and sharing data between facilities, security and speed of access become significant concerns. You need to be able to access and manipulate datasets in a timely manner, and also to ensure that sensitive information is protected at all points. In addition, your organization needs to comply with HIPAA, the GDPR, and other regulatory bodies that require healthcare and genomic data to stay within regional borders. Of course, compliance measures can also impact application performance—another hindrance to discovery and innovation. Using data in a responsible way includes intelligent and secure data management, and with datasets that enormous, it also means using automation and analytics. Time-consuming manual processes slow down diagnostics and increase the chance of error.

Cold data will cost you

The growing data footprint incurred by healthcare and life sciences pursuing new technologies can result in out-of-control IT costs, data insecurity, and an inability to analyze larger quantities of data. In fact, 75% to 90% of unstructured data sits siloed and unused, often eating up top-tier storage costs to no purpose. Moving infrequently accessed data to an archive tier can slash storage costs by up to 95%. However, determining what data to store where can be a laborious process—unless you have the right data management solution. NetApp cloud-connected solutions are designed to support an organization's journey to higher quality patient care and to more cost-effective IT solutions and services. With NetApp cloud and hybrid cloud solutions, you can significantly cut overhead, storage, and maintenance costs.

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Expert Guidance

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Technical Specifications

Exhaustive hardware and software metrics extracted directly from official documentation.

  • Virtual-, augmented-, and mixed-reality healthcare market by 2025
    $5.1 billion
  • Estimated human genomic data storage capacity by 2025
    40 exabytes
  • Healthcare and life sciences data CAGR through 2025
    36%
  • Office-based physicians using EHR systems
    85.9%
  • Hospitals with implemented in-patient or ambulatory EHR systems
    89%
  • Global market for artificial intelligence in healthcare by 2025
    US$31.3 billion
  • Illumina market share of genomic sequencer machines
    Roughly 70%
  • Unstructured data sitting siloed and unused
    75% to 90%
  • Storage cost reduction by moving to archive tier
    Up to 95%
  • Average cost of a healthcare data breach
    $6.45 million (up from $3.92 million in 2019)

  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
    Major cloud provider partnership for hyperscale service
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
    Major cloud provider partnership for hyperscale service
  • Microsoft Azure
    Major cloud provider partnership for hyperscale service

  • NVIDIA
    Integrated medical-imaging solution based on NVIDIA Clara Train SDK v2.0 with NVIDIA DGX-2 systems and NetApp AFF storage
  • Medical Imaging Partners
    Agfa, Fuji Film, Change, and more
  • Genomics Partner
    PetaGene
  • EHR Certifications
    Epic-, MEDITECH-, and EHR-certified
  • Epic Technical Alliance
    Maintained since 2010
  • Allscripts
    Runs Azure NetApp Files on its back end

  • HIPAA
    Compliant
  • GDPR
    Simplified compliance via NetApp Cloud Compliance service, NetApp ONTAP Data Security, and NetApp Cloud Insights
  • Data Security
    Embedded in NetApp technology (not an add-on)

  • NetApp AI Control Plane
    Full-stack AI data and experiment management solution providing extreme scalability, streamlined deployment, and nonstop data availability
  • NetApp Cloud Compliance service
    Compliance solution
  • NetApp ONTAP Data Security
    Data security solution
  • NetApp Cloud Insights
    Compliance and insights solution
  • Azure NetApp Files
    Cloud file service used by Allscripts
  • NetApp AFF storage
    All-flash storage used in NVIDIA Clara Train SDK v2.0 medical-imaging solution

  • Document ID
    NA-555-0321
  • Copyright
    © 2021 NetApp, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Compare NetApp for healthcare and life sciences Series

Select the right scale for your workload demands.

Model Name Max Capacity Port Config Action
NetApp AI Control Plane Extreme scalability with nonstop data availability N/A Get Quote
NetApp AFF storage with NVIDIA DGX-2 N/A N/A Get Quote
Azure NetApp Files N/A N/A Get Quote
NetApp ONTAP Data Security N/A N/A Get Quote
NetApp Cloud Compliance service N/A N/A Get Quote
NetApp Cloud Insights N/A N/A Get Quote

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