Healthcare Big Data: A Comprehensive Overview

2.1. The Data Overload

Back in 2012, a study estimated that healthcare data boast the largest share (30%) in occupying the overall electronic data storage in the world (Brown, 2015). To make the things graver, healthcare data is growing at a rapid pace, in fact seriously rapid. Among the growing digital universe healthcare is one of the fastest growing sectors. A report from the EMC Corporation along with the research firm IDC suggests that the digital healthcare data is growing at 48% per year whereas the growth rate of the overall digital universe 40% per year for the (IDC, 2014). The report estimates that the size of healthcare data will swell to 2,314 Exabytes by 2020 from a figure of 153 Exabytes in 2013 with an annual growth rate of 48%. The report elaborates that if all the digital healthcare data are stored on a stack of tablet computers, the height of the tower, by the year 2020, would cross 82,000 miles scaling from 5,500 miles in 2013 (Leventhal, 2014). The above statistics are sufficient to get a picture of the growth rate of the healthcare data and if this rate is continued, the healthcare data volume will soon reach the zettabyte and yottabyte scale.