The Dubai Health Authority recently held a workshop with Gulf Data to discuss the importance of IT infrastructure management and storage solutions.

Dr Mohammad Al Redha, the director of health data and information analysis department at the DHA pointed out that in the years to come healthcare organizations will have no choice but to invest in more IT infrastructure and storage and therefore the process should begin as early as possible.

This series of workshops and support initiatives to encourage the DHA health sector to be electronically integrated is in line with the the authority’s long-term vision to implement the Dubai Smart Healthcare Model, which includes three components: smart operations, smart applications and smart hospitals.

Dr Deepak Kaura, the chief radiology officer of Sidra Medical and Research Centre at Qatar said that the future of information technology in the healthcare sector was rapidly evolving and that huge flow of data may require up to 12GB of storage capacity to save genome data of a single person.

Dasha Deckworth, the director of global managed services at Atos, pointed out that the demand for long-term storage solutions of large amounts of data would grow in the future and the need to manage complex IT landscape and large amount of data will challenge the healthcare system.

Kaura said the introduction of a plethora of wearable devices like Google Glass, sports, fitness, heart rate and activity monitors will increasingly be augmented by connectivity to the emerging number of smart-watches and glasses devices that become available over the next five years.

This means not only will the hospital infrastructure move towards electronic integration, devices for health monitoring, fitness and wellbeing are also moving in the same direction, he added.

Dr Redha highlighted that there are several options available for hospitals to look into e-health and e-data storage and management and that the DHA is keen to support them in this endeavor.-TradeArabia News Service