Amazon woos healthcare organisations to AWS with dedicated data lake service

Data lake for healthcare sector enables quick querying, analysis, and machine learning applications

AWS has announced a new cloud data lake service for healthcare organisations at the cloud giant’s annual re:Invent summit.

Amazon HealthLake promises to gather healthcare organisations’ on-premises healthcare data into one centralised data lake for querying, analysis and predictions via machine learning.

Data is structured according to the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry-standard format, but HealthLake tags and indexes events in a timeline view with standardised labels to enable organisations to make sense of the majority of data that remains unstructured.

Amazon said organizations such as healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers will be able to use HealthLake to spot trends and anomalies in health data to make predictions about disease progression, clinical trials efficacy and the accuracy of insurance premiums.

“There has been an explosion of digitized health data in recent years with the advent of electronic medical records, but organizations are telling us that unlocking the value from this information using technology like machine learning is still challenging and riddled with barriers,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS.

“With Amazon HealthLake, healthcare organizations can reduce the time it takes to transform health data in the cloud from weeks to minutes so that it can be analyzed securely, even at petabyte scale. This completely reinvents what’s possible with healthcare and brings us that much closer to everyone’s goal of providing patients with more personalized and predictive treatment for individuals and across entire populations.”

Healthcare organisations already using AWS cloud machine learning tools to improve operations and patient care include AstraZeneca, Cerner, GE Healthcare, Pfizer, and Philips.

“At Cerner we are committed to transforming the future of healthcare through cloud delivery, machine learning, and AI. Working alongside AWS, we are in a position to accelerate innovation in healthcare,” said Ryan Hamilton, SVP, Population Health, Cerner.

“That starts with data. We are excited about the launch of Amazon HealthLake and its potential to quickly ingest patient data from various diverse sources and transform the data to perform advanced analytics to unlock new insights and serve many of our initiatives across population health.”