VentureBeat Article: AI in health care creates unique data challenges

“The health care industry produces an enormous amount of data. An IDC study estimates the volume of health data created annually, which hit over 2,000 exabytes in 2020, will continue to grow at a 48% rate year over year. Accelerated by the passage of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which mandated that health care practitioners adopt electronic records, there’s now a wealth of digital information about patients, practices, and procedures where before there was none.

The trend has enabled significant advances in AI and machine learning, which rely on large datasets to make predictions ranging from hospital bed capacity to the presence of malignant tumors in MRIs. But unlike other domains to which AI has been applied, the sensitivity and scale of health care data makes collecting and leveraging it a formidable challenge… 

Solutions to challenges in managing health care data necessarily entail a combination of techniques, approaches, and novel paradigms. Securing data requires data-loss prevention, policy and identity management, and encryption technologies, including those that allow organizations to track actions that affect their data. As for standardizing it, both incumbents like Google and Amazon and startups like Human API offer tools designed to consolidate disparate records.“