Operating a data center is no easy task. Operating a healthcare data center—one that services hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and other facilities—comes with its own unique set of challenges in addition to the usual ones.
To solve these problems, healthcare data centers must be aware of and anticipate them. Good preparation and planning help alleviate many of these concerns.
Here are the top five healthcare data center challenges to know about in 2025 and beyond.
1. Privacy and security
Healthcare data centers house vast amounts of patient information, including medical records, billing statements, and payment histories. This private health and financial data is a treasure trove that attracts cyber attackers.
Healthcare data centers experience cyber attacks every year. In 2024, malicious attacks compromised millions of patients’ data. October reports show 386 attacks have happened so far in the United States. The healthcare industry carries the highest average cost for cyber attacks compared to all other industries, at $9.77 million per incident.
Healthcare data center attacks in 2024 include:
- Change Healthcare (a subsidiary of UnitedHealth) had a ransomware attack in February that disrupted healthcare systems in the US for weeks. Many pharmacies and healthcare facilities—including entire hospitals—could not process claims or receive payments. Estimates say up to one-third of America’s population may have had private data such as treatment plans, medications, and diagnoses exposed. UnitedHealth paid a $22 million ransom to hackers to stop the attack.
- An HCA Healthcare breach compromised the personal data of 11 million people across 20 states.
- An attack on HealthEquity affected 4.3 million people and leaked private health data and social security numbers.
- A breach of MediSecure in Australia exposed data for almost 13 million people to the attackers.
- A cyber attack on Kaiser Permanente affected 13.4 million Americans and sent patient data to third-party companies such as Bing and Google.
- In May, Ascension Health System suffered a severe cyber attack that forced it to divert care to other hospital systems, placing critical patients at risk.
To solve this problem and keep patient data safe, healthcare data centers must improve protections against cyber attacks. This includes developing stronger encryption systems and restricting data access at a minimum. However, this is such a complex and widespread problem that each data center may need to develop a personalized solution.
2. Huge volumes of data
Every patient has a file containing medical records, lab results, medications, treatment plans, imaging scan copies, research data, billing and payment records, insurance claims, and other personal information. Multiply that large file by millions of patients, and you can see how much data must be safely stored within healthcare data centers.
Some facilities have turned to cloud storage systems as a solution, but that can be very expensive—especially considering the need for multiple backup copies in case of data loss.
Going forward, healthcare data centers will be looking for scalable solutions that offer data redundancy at lower prices than the current cloud storage options, which brings us to the third challenge.
3. Long-term storage and preservation of data
The important data in patient files goes far beyond current diagnoses and treatments. Patients often have years or decades of critical medical history in their files. Some conditions require extensive histories to diagnose, and prior histories are a valuable tool for doctors. It’s important to know if, for example, patients have received pain medication from several different doctors over time or if they underwent chemotherapy treatments as children. These situations and others could impact their future treatment plans.
It’s a challenge for healthcare data centers to keep and preserve all that data and keep it safe. The logistical complexity required to store these vast amounts of data is intimidating enough, but then data centers must also contend with the associated costs of storage.
Currently, cloud-based storage provides the convenience and scalability healthcare providers need—even if it’s expensive. Implementing a robust CRM can help providers access and make sense of the massive patient data repositories. No doctor wants to pore over years of poorly filed medical histories when their patient needs urgent treatment.
A CRM that can search for relevant terms and pull up convenient lists of medications, treatments, and diagnoses with a few clicks is crucial for quality patient care.
4. Data interoperability
It’s rare for a patient to receive care within just one healthcare system. A patient may see specialists within different hospitals, be tested at several labs, use the nearest urgent care, or arrive by ambulance at the closest emergency room without knowing how effectively those various hospital systems are communicating and sharing data.
This makes the need for data interoperability—the exchange and integration of data from different systems—extremely important. If hospital systems can’t communicate efficiently, patient care could be delayed with, in some cases, life-threatening consequences. For example, if one physician is unaware of the medications another physician has prescribed to the patient, he or she might accidentally give medication that causes a harmful interaction. Similarly, doctors may have to order the same lab work a patient just had from another hospital if they can’t access the test results. This exposes the patient to potential complications and delays from testing and increases costs for both patients and the insurance companies.
Achieving interoperability is easier said than done. Healthcare systems often have proprietary patient portals or different ways of formatting data within records that can make the one-to-one translation of patient information between systems difficult.
Ideally, healthcare data centers should be creating standardized formats and use software that helps keep records flowing freely, regardless of where the patient seeks care.
5. High costs and resource constraints
Healthcare data centers often consider adopting the newest data storage and organization solutions. However, these solutions are expensive. In addition to the up-front investment, the ongoing costs of maintenance, updates, and salaries for skilled service technicians and maintaining a patient data repository quickly become pricey.
Cloud platform costs can be staggering for facilities operating on-prem, so scaling upward often comes with its share of sticker shock.
Data centers will probably need to prioritize needs and decide which are feasible and which can wait. It often comes down to a choice between affordability versus flexibility and scalability.
Additionally, it can help to use a robust cloud cost-tracking tool that allows data centers to see where every dollar goes and optimize toward solutions that provide the most value. Detailed tracking of cloud costs means data centers can choose the infrastructure that provides the best cost efficiency—which should ideally translate to lower costs in the long run.
