AWS brings Amazon HealthLake into GA for managing health data
Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a service that allows health organizations to store and work with cloud-based health data. The service is part of the cloud giant's AWS for Health initiative, which provides specialized cloud services for healthcare, biopharma and genomics customers.
HealthLake is a HIPAA-eligible service that helps organizations leverage unstructured health information. It uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard to format data and enable organizations to move it from on-premise systems to a secure, cloud-based data lake. It then uses machine learning to analyze medical terminology and clinical data, and it provides standardized labels for data that makes it easier to search and analyze. With all that accomplished, AWS customers can then use analytics and machine learning to analyze the newly-structured data.
The service was first announced in December at Amazon's re:Invent conference. AWS's vice president for AI, Matt Wood, explained how the health field is hampered by the way that data is spread throughout numerous repositories in different formats, requiring weeks or months to prepare, stage, transform data.
Customers using HealthLake so far include Rush University Medical Center, which used HealthLake in its Covid-19 response. Cortica, which provides healthcare services to children with autism and other brain conditions, has used it for deeper insight into the care progression of its patients.