Medical images, lab results, pharmaceutical prescriptions. These are just a few of the elements that go into today’s electronic health records. It adds up to an abundance of healthcare data that needs to be properly managed. Cio.com explored this pressing issue in a recent article.

The volume of healthcare data is growing at a staggering rate, bringing with it a host of technical, compliance and governance challenges for CIOs working in that sector.

A recent report from EMC and the research firm IDC offers a few imaginative ways at visualizing that proliferation, anticipating an overall increase in health data of 48 percent annually.

The report pegs the volume of healthcare data at 153 exabytes in 2013. At projected growth rates, that figure will swell to 2,314 exabytes by 2020.

To paint a picture, the authors of the report suggest storing all of that data on a stack of tablet computers. By the 2013 tally, that stack would reach nearly 5,500 miles high. Seven years later, that tower would grow to more than 82,000 miles high, bringing you more than a third of the way to the moon.

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