The service will help healthcare providers to pool information from disparate data sources.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible offering that helps healthcare and life sciences entities collect and generate insights from large volumes of health data.
“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.”
Using ML technology to drive healthcare data management
Julian Simon, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Evangelist for EMEA for AWS, commented in a blog post. “The ability to store, transform, and analyze health data quickly and at any scale is critical in driving high-quality health decisions,” he opined.
“In their daily practice, doctors need a complete chronological view of patient history to identify the best course of action.”
Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning to understand and extract meaningful medical information from unstructured data, and then organizes, indexes, and stores that information in chronological order. The result provides a holistic view of patient health. The service leverages the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format to further enable interoperability by facilitating the exchange of information across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and more.
“Amazon HealthLake is backed by fully-managed AWS infrastructure,” Simon says. “You won’t have to procure, provision, or manage a single piece of IT equipment. All you have to do is create a new data store, which only takes a few minutes.”
Once the data store is ready, users can immediately create, read, update, delete, and query their data, he continues. HealthLake exposes a simple REST Application Programming Interface (API) available in the most popular languages, which customers and partners can easily integrate in their business applications.
Amazon HealthLake is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon), with additional region availability coming soon.