Amazon is no stranger to the healthcare market. The company has staked claims in the sector by establishing the Amazon Pharmacy storefront, which features the convenience of two-day guaranteed prescription delivery for Prime subscribers, and partnering with Crossover Health to introduce 17 on-premises health clinics for employees in the U.S. Despite notable achievements in the provider space, it is the e-commerce giant’s forays into data interoperability innovation via Amazon Web Services that will galvanize the process of modernizing data handling.
AWS has more than a few irons in the fire on this front. Change Healthcare’s clinical data interoperability and infrastructure services toolkit found itself a perfect host in the form of AWS due to the remarkable flexibility offered. Shez Partovi, M.D., the Director of Worldwide Healthcare and Life Sciences, Business and Market Development at Amazon Web Services, said, “AWS provides services to support those who want to implement ubiquitous healthcare interoperability. AWS provides a secure, agile and scalable infrastructure, with access to over 100 HIPAA-eligible services, enabling Change Healthcare to support the delivery of critical and accurate medical information from a variety of sources across the healthcare industry.” Specific functionalities brought to the table through this partnership include document recovery, identity management, and record location.
Amazon API Gateway is further providing a gateway for Cloudticity’s HIPAA-compliant interoperability RESTFul API, which leverages full use of HTTP for its web API. The Gateway also hosts Cerner’s HealtheIntent population health management platform to facilitate an increased scaling of its coordinated care and data sharing capabilities. Black Pear Software has tapped AWS to furnish its modular infrastructure for the provision of FHIR APIs in a deep well of applications such as patient tools, appointment logs, and clinical systems.
One of AWS’s newest native service programs is called Amazon HealthLake, a means for healthcare and life sciences institutions to collect information into a “data lake” and translate it for machine learning. This HIPAA-eligible service structures data into the FHIR industry configuration for a comprehensive insight into individual and population health. Unconstrained data sharing and clarity are HealthLake’s not-so-secret weapons in visualizing trends to identify anomalies, track disease progress, and assess the veracity of insurance premiums. Beyond improving compatibility with third-party applications, the service aims to normalize patient records across all available formats with the ability to filter health events into a timeline view.
