July 16, 2021 – Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations to ingest, store, query, and analyze their health data at scale.
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 so that it can provide 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 a new service that is part of AWS for Health, a comprehensive offering of AWS services and AWS Partner Network solutions. AWS for Health provides capabilities that help organizations increase the pace of innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized approaches to therapeutic development and care.
Customers can examine trends like disease progression at the individual or population health level over time, spot opportunities for early intervention, and deliver personalized medicine, the company says.
Using Amazon HealthLake, organizations can move their FHIR-formatted health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud.
Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning models that understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information.
The service then enriches data with standardized labels (e.g. medications, conditions, diagnoses, etc.) so the data can be easily searched and analyzed, Amazon says.
Amazon HealthLake also indexes events like patient visits into a timeline, giving medical professionals a holistic, chronological view of each patient’s medical history.
Once this heavy lifting is completed, customers can apply analytics and machine learning on top of this newly normalized and structured data.
Customers who do not already have data in the FHIR format can work with AWS Connector Partners, such as Diameter Health, InterSystems, Redox, and HealthLX, who have built validated Amazon HealthLake connectors to transform existing healthcare data into FHIR format and move it to Amazon HealthLake.
Amazon HealthLake is available today in U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. East (Ohio), and U.S. West (Oregon), with additional region availability coming soon.