The current state of data in the medical field is akin to a tornado, a whirlwind of information that gathers material from a variety of sources and is remarkably difficult to control. This includes data from scribbled doctors’ notes, recorded audio and video via telemedicine, x-rays and images, wearable devices and healthcare applications.

How to manage the medical data tornado is one of the tech field’s biggest challenges, and it has led Amazon Web Services Inc. to introduce Amazon HealthLake as a way to bring some semblance of availability, understanding and order to the healthcare data field.

“That is the biggest challenge for every healthcare provider, payer or life science organization today,” said Taha Kass-Hout (pictured), director of machine learning and chief medical officer at AWS. “Data comes in all shapes, forms and formats. It’s a huge, heavy lift for any healthcare organization to be able to aggregate, normalize and store securely.”

Kass-Hout spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the process used by Amazon HealthLake to extract medical data from varied sources and steps taken to ensure that patient information is secure. (* Disclosure below.)

Understanding data context

Amazon HealthLake is a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA-eligible service, which enables healthcare providers, insurance firms and pharmaceutical companies to store and analyze health data at petabyte scale.

“Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning models trained to automatically understand context and extract medical data from raw, disparate information, such as medications, procedures and diagnoses,” Kass-Hout said. “It tags and indexes every piece of information and then structures it in an open standard, the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, or FHIR standard, to provide a 360-degree view of each patient in a consistent way so that you’ll be able to query and share that data securely.”

One of the dynamics that has held back efforts to corral a massive amount of medical data is concern around protecting patient privacy. AWS is careful to emphasize the HIPAA and FHIR standards it must meet in providing Amazon HealthLake to customers.

“Your data in Amazon HealthLake is secure, compliant and auditable,” Kass-Hout said. “Your data is always encrypted.”

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