People can choose not to use ride sharing or ignore social media, but when it comes to healthcare, everyone ultimately takes an interest.

Mindful of this basic reality, Amazon Web Services Inc. has built its own Healthcare and Life Sciences practice in cloud computing to address that need.

“The entire practice of AWS Healthcare Life Sciences is keenly aware of looking through the customer to the individual,” said Shez Partovi (pictured), senior leader of global business development for healthcare, life sciences and genomics at AWS. “We want to elevate the human condition. That is the reason I joined AWS.”

Partovi, who is also a physician, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) during the AWS Summit in NYC. They discussed how AWS applies machine learning to predictive models for health issues and the impact of cloud computing on the field of genomic sequencing (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Predicting heart failure

Elevating the human condition takes plenty of compute power and the ability to draw on machine-learning models for diagnostics. AWS has partnered with a number of its customers to apply analytics based on healthcare data and create predictive models.

“Using artificial intelligence and machine-learning services on top of data to predict and forecast events is a big part,” Partovi said. “You can predict congestive heart failure 15 months in advance of it actually occurring.”

Genomics is another critical area of healthcare research where the power of cloud computing is having an impact. It is a field that requires major amounts of compute and storage to enable precision diagnostics, according to Partovi.

“The first whole genome sequence took 14 years and billions of dollars,” Partovi said. “Children’s Hospital Philadelphia now does a thousand whole genome sequences in two hours and 20 minutes on AWS. Genomics is a field that literally can’t be done outside the cloud.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit NYC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit NYC. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE