AWS has launched Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible cloud service enabling healthcare and life sciences companies to ingest, store, query, and analyze their health data at scale. Amazon HealthLake understands and extracts relevant medical information from unstructured data using machine learning, then organizes, indexes, and stores that data in chronological order. As a result, a comprehensive picture of a patient’s health would emerge.
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The cloud service uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format to improve interoperability by allowing information to flow freely across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical firms, clinical researchers, health insurers, and patients.
Amazon HealthLake is a new service that is part of AWS for Health, which is a complete portfolio of AWS services and AWS Partner Network solutions that are utilized by thousands of healthcare and life sciences clients across the world. AWS for Health would offer proven and easily accessible capabilities that enable companies accelerate innovation, unlock the value of health data, and build more tailored treatment research and care methods.
As part of AWS for Health, Amazon HealthLake would make it even easier for clients to apply analytics and machine learning to their newly standardized and organized data. Clients may use this data to track illness development at the individual or community level over time, identify early intervention opportunities, and offer tailored treatment.
Rush University Medical Center, a preview customer of Amazon HealthLake is an academic medical center that includes a 671-bed hospital serving adults and children, the 61-bed Johnston R. Bowman Health Center, and Rush University. For more than 180 years, the Medical Center has been leading the way in developing innovative and often life-saving treatments.
“Even while still in preview, Amazon HealthLake was an integral part of our COVID-19 response and our efforts to address health inequities,” said Dr. Bala Hota, Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer at Rush University Medical Center. “It has enabled us to quickly store disparate data from multiple data sources in FHIR format in order to gain critical insights into the care of COVID-19 patients. We have also used HealthLake’s integrated natural language processing to extract information such as medication, diagnosis, and previous conditions from doctors’ clinical notes and enrich patient records to examine barriers to healthcare access, providing our researchers additional data points for analytics. With the HealthLake API, we created a mobile app to provide insights into care gaps across the West Side of Chicago. Amazon HealthLake enables us to accelerate insights and drive decisions faster to better serve the Chicago community.”
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Chronological Overview of Each Patient’s Medical History
Organizations may migrate FHIR-formatted health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud using Amazon HealthLake. To recognize and tag each piece of clinical data, Amazon HealthLake uses highly trained machine learning algorithms that comprehend medical language. The service then adds standardized labels to the data (such as drugs, ailments, diagnoses, and so on) so that it may be searched and analyzed more simply.
Amazon HealthLake also creates a chronology of events like as patient visits, providing medical practitioners with a comprehensive, chronological overview of each patient’s medical history. Customers can use analytics and machine learning when this hard lifting is accomplished. Clints may use analytics and machine learning on top of this freshly standardized and organized data once the heavy lifting is done.
Customers may use Amazon QuickSight to identify patient and population-level patterns, as well as Amazon SageMaker to construct sophisticated machine learning models that can help make accurate predictions about illness progression, clinical trial efficacy, insurance claim eligibility, and more. Amazon HealthLake also stores data in the FHIR standard, which makes it simple for organizations, academics, and practitioners to cooperate and expedite treatment breakthroughs, get vaccines to market faster, and uncover health patterns in patient groups.
Clients that do not have data in the FHIR format can work with AWS Connector Partners such as Diameter Health, InterSystems, Redox, and HealthLX to turn current healthcare data into FHIR format and send it to Amazon HealthLake.
AWS for Health, a growing portfolio of solutions that would simplify how healthcare, biopharma, and genomics organizations discover, assess, and deploy cloud solutions to achieve better business and patient outcomes, now includes Amazon HealthLake’s purpose-built analytics and machine learning capabilities. Clients may use AWS for Health products to construct complete Electronic Health Records to assist doctors make data-driven care plans, speed up research and discovery to bring novel treatments to market quicker, and power population genomic efforts to make precision medicine more accessible.
“More and more of our customers in the healthcare and life sciences space are looking to organize and make sense of their reams of data, but are finding this process challenging and cumbersome,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. “We built Amazon HealthLake to remove this heavy lifting for healthcare organizations so they can transform health data in the cloud in minutes and begin analyzing that information securely at scale. Alongside AWS for Health, we’re excited about how Amazon HealthLake can help medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies provide patients and populations with data-driven, personalized, and predictive care.”
Amazon HealthLake is now available in the US East (North Carolina), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon), with more regions to follow soon.
