Amazon HealthLake

A new AWS tooling has been announced at this month’s re:Invent (click the link to access an on-demand recording of the intro announcement). This represents a game-changing development for digital transformation in healthcare and will interest solutions architects & data engineers working on everything from the most esoteric genomic data to “live” laboratory findings.

Driven by growing market demand for insights into Type II Diabetes and similarly pandemic-scale problems affecting the species, which will be better addressed with AI-driven tools that are only just beginning to reach productionisation. An excerpt from the announcement (which originally ran as a live hands-on lab during the conference):

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed a digital transformation in healthcare, with organizations capturing huge volumes of patient information […] with information trapped in clinical notes, insurance claims, recorded conversations […] the new Amazon HealthLake service removes the heavy lifting of organizing, indexing, and structuring patient information […] the FHIR standard format [enables] machine learning models to analyze and understand relationships in the data, identify trends, and make predictions, ultimately delivering better care for patients.

According to IBM’s knowledge centre, the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR® — pronounced “fire”) format is a “draft standard” from Health Level 7 International (HL7 — see hl7.org) that leverages XML &JSON for data representation; it’s designed with the express purpose of facilitating exchange of electronic health records. You can see why Amazon settled on this format for the new service.

Following export of data from HealthLake in standard format, the idea is to perform analyses using other tools from AWS (I guess you could use alternative providers too) with seamless connections to eg Quicksight and/or SageMaker.

Do check the recorded session linked above, for full explanation including (albeit brief) case studies from Konica Minolta and Orion Health. Oh and, by the way, HealthLake is fully “HIPAA-eligible”. It’s already available in “preview” mode so you can dive in and try exploring right away. I’m hoping to take a technical deep dive myself and post a follow-up story detailing my discoveries, some time in the New Year.