Among the many announcements to come from AWS re:Invent 2021 was a set of initiatives for the healthcare space. These included support for the migration of electronic health records to the cloud and significant performance improvements by a major healthcare software company.

“One of the big trends in healthcare is digitizing records to really help and assist with patient care,” said Sandy Carter (pictured), vice president of worldwide public sector partners and programs at Amazon Web Services Inc. “We have added technical subject matter experts and industry subject matter experts in the healthcare space who understand how to help us migrate at least 500 independent software vendor applications over to AWS. This is really big news because so far, most of those applications are running on-premises, and getting them over to the cloud gives providers the scalability, gives them the agility that they need to provide all of us with better healthcare.”

Carter spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the recent migration of a key healthcare software provider to the cloud and how AWS is enabling patient record security. (* Disclosure below.)

Widely used software

In addition to migration of electric health record applications, AWS also announced that Epic Systems Inc. had been migrated to the AWS cloud. Over 250 million patients globally have an electronic record managed by Epic software.

The healthcare technology firm’s migration was supported by AWS’ release of its new EC2 instance earlier this yearm called M6i, according to Carter.

“Epic started testing on the M6i, and what we saw was a 40% performance improvement, which is huge, as well as a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership,” Carter said. “As your application runs on top of Epic, you are going to get that performance gain. Our consulting partners are also going to see the benefit because of that total cost of ownership reduction.”

The heavily regulated healthcare industry demands security and compliance for the handling of patient records. To meet this need, AWS also announced that it would extend its Authority to Operate program for enabling partners with the security and compliance necessary in the healthcare space.

“If you are a hospital, you can’t risk having that patient information exposed,” Carter said. “We introduced, as Authority to Operate, a program that enables our partners to get HIPAA and high trust authorization faster and cheaper so they can move with this new digital trend that’s happening all across healthcare.”

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: AWS Public Sector sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE