Healthcare can learn a lot from retail when it comes to medical data storage and the tools used to utilize that data, according to Kate McCarthy, an analyst at Forrester Research who focuses on CIOs and health IT.

Storage and data analytics technologies are helping companies in the retail space understand what customers are likely to purchase based on their travel plans, what the customer's budget is, what they're looking to buy and more.

"I use Amazon for lots of things, and it very nicely reminds when I'm due for something to be restocked, and so there are all of those things built into their data algorithms that enable them to influence their customers; and it's not just influencing their customers, it's understanding their customers," McCarthy said. "If we could do even half of that in healthcare, it would allow us to reduce bad clinical outcomes, it would allow us to improve quality of care, it would allow us to, essentially, prevent disease manifestation."

For example, if a hospital could monitor a prediabetic patient, trend that person's data and identify patterns in behavior that put them more at risk for moving into the actual category of diabetes, "those are all things you'd be able to do if you started to adopt new strategies for data and leveraging things like unstructured data, leveraging technologies like cognitive [computing]," McCarthy said. "If healthcare really gets engaged in doing things like that, the possibilities are truly endless."

Of course, in order to do any of this in healthcare -- data analytics, population health management, cognitive computing -- effective medical data storage is required.