AWS Releasing Amazon HealthLake

SEATTLE — Amazon Web Services is rolling out a specialized data lake for the health care industry.

AWS has introduced Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for health care organizations to ingest, store, query, and analyze their data at scale, according to the company this month. 

Amazon HealthLake is currently available in several regions in the AWS Console: US East (N. Virginia); US East (Ohio); and US West (Oregon).

The company said additional regional availability is “coming soon.”

Amazon HealthLake is set up to use machine learning (ML) to understand and extract meaningful medical information from unstructured data. It then organizes, indexes, and stores the information in chronological order. 

The ML-based data lake is intended to provide a “holistic view” of patient health. 

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The service employs the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format to enable interoperability through the exchange of information: across health care systems; pharmaceutical companies; clinical researchers; health insurers; patients; and others. 

As part of AWS for Health, Amazon HealthLake is also designed to facilitate users’ application of analytics and machine learning “on top of” their normalized and structured data. 

Users, for instance, can examine trends such as disease progression at the individual or population level, find opportunities for early intervention, and deliver personalized medicine, according to AWS.

Amazon HealthLake was built to remove the “heavy lifting” for health care organizations, allowing them to transform health data in the cloud “in minutes” and analyze the information securely at scale, said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon machine learning, AWS.

“More and more of our customers in the health care and life sciences space are looking to organize and make sense of their reams of data but are finding this process challenging and cumbersome,” Sivasubramanian said.

Several health care organizations are using Amazon HealthLake as “preview” customers: Rush University Medical Center; Cortica; CureMatch; and MEDHOST.

“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, VP and chief analytics officer, 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 in to the care of COVID-19 patients.”

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