Social Secret –AWS announces general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service that allows health organizations to store and work with health data in cloudAWS announces general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service that allows health organizations to store and work with health data in cloud (Stephanie Condon/ZDNet)
— The service is part of the cloud giant’s AWS for Health initiative, which provides specialized cloud services for healthcare, biopharma and genomics customers.
The Amazon Web Services company announced on Thursday that Amazon HealthLake, which is a cloud-based service that allows organizations to store and manage health-related data in the cloud, is now generally available. Cloud giant AWS is offering the service as part of its AWS for Health initiative, which provides cloud services specialized for healthcare, biopharmaceutical and genomics companies.
With the help of HealthLake, organizations can proactively utilize their unstructured health information in a way that is HIPAA-compliant. Data is formatted using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards, which is a standard set by the healthcare industry to enable organizations to move their data from on-premises systems to a secure, cloud-based data lake in a secure manner. As soon as the data is analyzed by machine learning, it is able to provide standardized labels for data that make searching and analyzing it much easier, and it then uses machine learning to analyze medical terminology and clinical data, as well. The newly structured data can then be analyzed using analytics and machine learning, after all of this has been achieved, by AWS customers.
At Amazon’s re:Invent conference held in December, the service was announced for the first time. The vice president of AWS’s AI division, Matt Wood, explained how the health field has been hindered by the fact that data is spread across a wide range of repositories and formats, making it difficult for researchers to prepare, stage, and transform them.
HealthLake has been used by a number of clients to date, including Rush University Medical Center, which offered a Covid-19 response using HealthLake. This tool has been used by Cortica, a company that provides medical care to children with autism and other neurological conditions, in order to gain a deeper understanding of the progress of their treatment.
