Organ donors have saved lives for years. Now anyone can help to fight heart disease, the leading cause of death globally, by donating their data to researchers at the American Heart Association.

The AHA has established the Precision Medicine Platform for its researchers to analyze vast data on heart disease and stroke.

“What’s so awesome about the platform is that it’s very dynamic,” said Laura Stevens (pictured), AHA data scientist. It brings together gargantuan data sets from hospitals and the cannon of clinical trials to gain broader, deeper insights into prevention and treatment. And at Myresearchlegacy.com, anyone — healthy or ailing — can donate their genetic, health and lifestyle data to help researchers treat patients.

AHA stores and analyzes data in the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud, Stevens said during an interview at this week’s AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas, Nevada. She spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor. 

Cloud security passes exam

The data that individuals or institutions donate to the AHA will go toward all types of research on the prevention and treatment of heart disease. Genetic data that individuals contribute is useful for cutting-edge precision medicine. This burgeoning branch of healthcare takes an individual’s genes as well as environmental and lifestyle factors into account to develop treatments tailored for him or her.

Healthcare-data compliance regulations and cloud aren’t known for being 100 percent made for each other. However, the AWS cloud’s security meets the stringent standards of the AHA, according to Stevens. “It’s sort of a walled garden behind your data, so that it’s not accessible to people that don’t have access to the data. And it’s also HIPA compliant; it meets the utmost standards in healthcare today.”

The analytics services available from AWS are a potent complement to the Amazon S3 buckets for vast data storage, Stevens added. Together, they make AHA’s platform an oracle for inquiring minds in the organization. “I do use the platform to answer my own research questions,” she said. Amazon Elastic MapReduce for big-data processing and analysis is “my jam,” she said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE