Healthcare Data Points and Assumptions

average hospitalized patient generates 1GB of EHR data per year (guesstimate based on estimate of 80MB per year back in 2011 at Beth Israel Deaconess)
US adults that have EHR data is about 65% (based on estimate of 62% in 2018)
84.3% of Americans had contact with a health professional in 2019 (CDC)
264,000,000 American adults (US Census)

So assuming liberally that every American adult that contacted a health professional generated as much data as the averaged hospitalized patient, and the health professional uses an EHR we get this estimate of EHR data per year:

264,000,000 x 84.3% x 1 GB = 222,552,000GB. Which is 0.2 exabytes (1 EB = 1^9GB) of EHR data generated annually

Consumer Data Points and Assumptions

average digital user (with access to internet, smartphone or both) generates about 0.5 GB per day = 180GB annually (estimate from Quora).
digital users in total generate 2.5EB per day = 913EB per year (DOMO estimate)
digital users worldwide = 3.7B people
adult digital users in US = 90% of adult population = 237,600,000 people

So by the Quora estimate, we have about 180 GB x 237.6M people = 43EB of consumer data annually. By the DOMO estimate, we have 913EB / 3.7B people x 237,600,000 US digital users = 59EB of consumer data annually. Let’s call it 50EB of consumer data annually.

Back to “Where is our health data”