Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud arm of Amazon, has announced the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations to securely store, transform, query, and analyze health data in minutes.
Amazon HealthLake is currently available in the US East, US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon), with additional region availability coming soon.
The new service is part of AWS for Health, an offering of AWS that provides proven and easily accessible capabilities to help healthcare and life science organizations increase the pace of innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized approaches to therapeutic development and care.
Using the HealthLake APIs, healthcare organizations can easily copy health data, such as medical reports or patient notes, from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud, and analyze it at a petabyte scale. HealthLake uses machine learning (ML) models to automatically understand and extract meaningful medical information from the raw data, such as medications, procedures, and diagnoses.
HealthLake organizes and indexes all the information and stores it in the FHIR format to facilitate the exchange of information, making it easier for organizations, researchers, and practitioners to collaborate and accelerate breakthroughs in treatments, deliver vaccines to market faster, and discover health trends in patient populations.
Cortica, InterSystems, Redox, and Rush University Medical Center are some of the customers and partners using the Amazon HealthLake service.
“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.
Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS.''
Earlier,Amazon.com Inc had expanded its virtual healthcare service to other Washington state employers starting on Wednesday and to its own employees and other businesses nationwide this summer, the company said in a news release.
Piloted in September 2019 for staff near its Seattle headquarters, “Amazon Care” lets employees video-chat with doctors for diagnoses and referrals. It also facilitates housecalls and drug delivery in greater Seattle, a non-virtual benefit that Amazon said would be available in greater Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in the coming months.
The move shows how the No. 2 U.S. private employer is diving further into healthcare, the latest industry it has aimed to disrupt after retail, enterprise technology and Hollywood.
Amazon was delivering prescription medications through an online pharmacy it launched last year and earlier worked with Berkshire Hathaway Inc and JPMorgan Chase & Co on lowering care costs in a now-disbanded venture called Haven.
It was a playbook for offering healthcare in-house and then to other employers resembles how Amazon built data centers to satisfy its own Web needs, before opening up the same infrastructure to startups in what became its cloud-computing business.