In mid-July, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations to ingest, store, query, and analyze their health data at scale.

Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning to understand and extract meaningful medical information from unstructured data, and then organizes, indexes, and stores that information in chronological order. The result provides a holistic view of patient health.

The service also leverages the FHIR industry standard format to further enable interoperability by facilitating the exchange of information across healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, patients, and more.

Amazon HealthLake removes the heavy lifting of health data by using highly accurate machine learning to automate the extraction and transformation of unstructured health data so organizations can apply advanced analytics and customized machine-learning models to their information. Using Amazon HealthLake, organizations can easily move their FHIR-formatted health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud.

“More and more of our customers in the healthcare and life sciences space are looking to organize and make sense of their reams of data, but are finding this process challenging and cumbersome,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS, in this press release. “We built Amazon HealthLake to remove this heavy lifting for healthcare organizations so they can transform health data in the cloud in minutes and begin analyzing that information securely at scale.”

According to this recent FierceHealthcare article, Rush University Medical Center used Amazon HealthLake as an integral part of its COVID-19 response.

"It has enabled us to quickly store disparate data from multiple data sources in FHIR format in order to gain critical insights into the care of COVID-19 patients,” said Dr. Bala Hota, Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer at Rush University Medical Center, in the FierceHealthcare article.

The care facility also used HealthLake’s natural language processing to extract information such as medication, diagnosis, and previous conditions from doctors’ clinical notes to examine barriers to healthcare access.

With big tech players moving into the health data analytics arena these days, it certainly seems that Amazon is truly bringing the vision of health data sharing to life with its HealthLake offering.

 RosettaHealth can assist with any health information challenges you might have, book a free consultation with one of our interoperability experts.