Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a cloud service that enables healthcare organizations to pool medical information from different systems in one place and use it to improve patient care.

Medical data is often spread across multiple applications. At a hospital, clinical notes, lab reports and insurance claims may be kept in different databases, which can make it difficult for healthcare professionals to access the information in a timely manner. AWS says that using HealthLake to centralize such disparate records in a single data repository simplifies information access. 

“In their daily practice, doctors need a complete chronological view of patient history to identify the best course of action,“ AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning evangelist Julien Simon wrote in a blog post today. “During an emergency, giving medical teams the right information at the right time can dramatically improve patient outcomes. Likewise, healthcare and life sciences researchers need high-quality, normalized data that they can analyze and build models with, to identify population health trends or drug trial recipients.”

HealthLake provides a set of connectors that can automatically import records from commonly used healthcare applications. Once the records are in the service, natural language processing algorithms organize the data to make it easier to work with. 

The algorithms scan medical documents such as clinical notes and extract the patient information they contain. HealthLake then indexes the information similarly to how a search engine indexes web pages. This process turns the raw unstructured records into a form that can be easily searched later on for specific items even if the size of the database grows to several petabytes over time. 

The result, according to AWS, is that healthcare professionals gain the ability to obtain information about patients’ medical histories faster than by manually sifting through documents.

HealthLake also enables healthcare organizations to transfer the information to other systems for further processing. The platform stores medical data in an industry-standard data format known as FHIR. It provides the ability to move records to many clinical applications without the need for complicated formatting changes. The data transfer itself, in turn, is performed using an application programming interface that AWS provides as part of the HealthLake feature set.

One of the use cases AWS promises to enable with the service is harnessing artificial intelligence to improve patient care. Researchers are working on ways of using AI algorithms to automate tasks such as diagnosing medical conditions and planning treatment plans. HealthLake can ease the logistics of streaming medical data from a healthcare provider’s systems to the AI algorithms that analyze it to generate recommendations.

AWS manages the cloud infrastructure hosting each HealthLake environment to simplify maintenance for customers. When the data in HealthLake is at rest, it’s encrypted using the AWS Key Management Service, which allows healthcare providers to scramble records either with an encryption they generate themselves or with one supplied by the cloud giant. TLS 1.2 encryption protects the data while it’s moving across the network. 

“Amazon HealthLake is backed by fully managed AWS infrastructure,” AWS’ Simon wrote. “You won’t have to procure, provision, or manage a single piece of IT equipment. All you have to do is create a new data store, which only takes a few minutes. Once the data store is ready, you can immediately create, read, update, delete, and query your data.”

AWS rival Google LLC last year launched a similar service called Google Healthcare API that aims to make it easier to access healthcare information. The service can aggregate medical records from multiple disparate applications, turn them into a standardized format and then make the integrated dataset available for analysis.

The healthcare sector is one of the areas that the major cloud providers have prioritized as part of their recent efforts to add more vertical-specific services. Over recent years, AWS has also rolled out new vertical-specific offerings for other markets including the industrial sector and the financial services segment. 

AWS’ value proposition for healthcare organizations has also benefited from its investments in edge computing. The cloud giant provides appliances called AWS Outposts that enable customers to set up miniature versions of its public cloud on-premises. Outposts appliances can enable, among other use cases, fast on-premises processing of medical information at locations such as hospitals to reduce latency. 

The growing number of services that AWS and its rivals are rolling out for healthcare organizations could help accelerate the sector’s cloud adoption, which is believed to be moving slower than in other areas.

Image: AWS