AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
It’s Day One For Our Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners – Looking Ahead to 2017
Aaron Friedman is a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services
Over this past week, we’ve seen how many of our Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners architect compliant workloads on AWS (and these were just a couple of highlights from our Healthcare and Life Sciences Competency Partner base!). I’m continuously impressed at the innovative ways our Healthcare & Life Sciences Partners are raising the bar to deliver meaningful solutions across the healthcare and life sciences spectrum to their customers.
As we commonly say here at AWS, it is still Day One. I have found that this saying is extremely applicable to our APN Partners. Just as we are rapidly innovating to meet the needs of AWS Customers and APN Partners, so too are our APN Partners innovating with a goal to deliver the best possible experience to their customers on AWS. This week, we had the pleasure of profiling a number of APN Partners in the healthcare and life sciences space to learn exactly how they take advantage of AWS to drive customer success. Let’s take a look back at these posts now.
- How Cognizant Approaches GxP Workloads on AWS
- How ClearDATA Utilizes Automation to Support Healthcare & Life Sciences Customers on AWS
- How hc1.com Architects for HIPAA Compliance in the Cloud
- Achieving Compliance Through DevOps with REAN Cloud
- How Cloudticity Uses Automation to Scale Healthcare Solutions
As we begin to close out this week, I’d like to tell you about a few more of our Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners and their Day One outlook for 2017. It should be a great year to be a Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner with AWS!
Medidata
For the last 17 years, Medidata Solutions has been collecting, storing, managing and analyzing clinical trial data. Working with approximately 800 life sciences customers, the cloud-based company has amassed one of the largest sets of clinical data assets in the world. “As Medidata has grown, our relationship with AWS has become increasingly important,” says Pramod Somashekar, Senior Manager, Data Science at Medidata. “Instead of focusing staff time and energy on infrastructure support, AWS allows us to put our efforts into deploying new apps—ultimately meeting and exceeding the needs of our customers.”
A key focus area for Medidata, an AWS Life Sciences Competency Partner, in 2017 will be expanding its Clinical Trial Genomics solution, which links patients’ genomic data to their clinical trial records. This solution holds real promise for the life sciences industry, as genomic data can be mined for biomarkers that improve clinical trial inclusion and exclusion criteria, patient randomization, adaptive prevention, and the identification of new precision therapies. Launched at re:Invent 2016, AWS Step Functions has helped Medidata coordinate large-scale distributed genomics applications. “For true real-time clinical trial genomics analyses, we are required to take a single genomic sample and run that through a maze of complex processing pipelines and workflows to get an end result. With Step Functions, our main project focus and planning has shifted from ‘how do we chain and coordinate these processes together’ to ‘what do we want this thing to do’. That is a really powerful shift,” says Pramod. “Using AWS has given us a lot of flexibility, helping us tune products and conduct pilots faster.”
We featured Medidata on the APN Blog this past August. Check it out here.
Sturdy Networks
Sturdy Networks is a APN Consulting Partner who holds both the AWS Healthcare and IoT Competencies. Naturally, the team at Sturdy is very excited to continue the convergence of these two disciplines. “Sturdy is most excited about the intersection of healthcare and IoT,” says Tolga Tarhan, CTO. “We’re working with medical device manufactures to connect devices to the cloud and enable entirely new classes of devices that can leverage the computing power of the AWS Cloud. We believe this will help to deliver better experiences to medical professionals, and better outcomes to patients.”
In 2017, Sturdy is most excited to see where the intersection of IoT, medical devices, and big data meet in the cloud. From what Sturdy has seen, for the last few years, an increasing number of medical devices have been connecting to the cloud. Initially this connectivity was used for what Sturdy refers to as “ecosystem” apps: things that weren’t core to the medical device, but formed an ecosystem around it, such as mobile apps.
Recently, Sturdy has started to see more and more instances in which a core part of a medical device was cloud-powered. Sturdy Networks believes that the Internet of Medical Things has the potential to disrupt how we practice medicine by providing high-resolution longitudinal quantification of our health. Take for example the ability to add cloud-based intelligence to a device that diagnoses a particular condition. In what ways could cloud-powered Big Data solutions lead to more accuracy and improve diagnostic results?
With device connectivity becoming ubiquitous, Sturdy is very excited to help customers leverage AWS IoT and big data offerings deliver new healthcare solutions to the market.
Syapse
Syapse’s goal is to transform healthcare with precision medicine. Having developed its precision medicine platform on AWS, Syapse, an AWS Healthcare Technology Competency Partner, is able to focus on scaling the company’s differentiated precision medicine platform and provide additional value to its healthcare customers. “In order to scale our infrastructure to meet the needs of our business, we have focused heavily on templatizing all of our infrastructure-as-code,” says Nick Steel, Syapse’s Director of Cloud Operations. “In 2017, one of our key focuses is on continuing to optimize our continuous integration and continuous delivery approach for both our software as well as the environment in which it runs. Not only does this help us from a compliance standpoint, but we are able to quickly deploy our platform for new customers, which helps us ensure that our technology can scale with our business, both domestically and internationally.”
One of the additional benefits of infrastructure-as-code is an increased pace of innovation. After AWS announced HIPAA-eligibility for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL at re:Invent 2016, Syapse was able to quickly integrate this managed database service into its platform. By testing each component independently and then making the appropriate updates to their Terraform configurations, the Syapse team tells us they are able to quickly adopt new HIPAA-eligible services and further enhance the platform. “We’re excited every time AWS adds new HIPAA-eligible services to their program,” says Nick. “Each time a new service is added we find that we can further accelerate our pace of innovation.”
Syapse was featured on the AWS Blog last February in a post entitled, “How The Healthcare of Tomorrow is Being Delivered Today” – read it here.
Connect with Healthcare and Life Sciences Competency Partners on AWS
AWS Healthcare Competency Partners have demonstrated success in building solutions for healthcare payers and providers that securely store, process, transmit, and analyze clinical information. Working with these Competency Partners gives you access to innovative, cloud-based solutions that have a proven track record handling clinical data.
Consulting Partners:
- 8KMiles
- ClearDATA
- Cloudticity
- Cognizant
- Connectria Hosting
- CorpInfo
- Flux7
- G2 Technology Group
- Logicworks
- Mobiquity
- Sturdy Networks
Technology Partners:
Clinical Information Systems
- Calgary Scientific
- Practice Fusion
- Syapse
Population Health & Analytics
- QuintilesIMS
- Philips
- hc1.com
Health Administration
- Appian
- Captricity
- Infor
- Pegasystems
Compliance Services
- Aptible
Life Science Competency Partners help you conduct drug discovery, manage clinical trials, engage in manufacturing and distribution activities, conduct research and development of novel genetic-based treatments and companion diagnostics.
Consulting Partners:
- 2nd Watch
- 8KMiles
- BioTeam Inc.
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- Cognizant
- Flux7
- G2 Technology Group
- HCL
- Infosys
- Mobiquity
- REAN Cloud
- Wipro
Technology Partners:
- Appian
- DNAnexus
- Core Informatics
- Cycle Computing
- Medidata
- Seven Bridges Genomics
- Syapse
- Turbot
Conclusion
Healthcare and Life Sciences Partners are constantly developing innovative solutions for healthcare and life sciences on AWS. And as you can see, we highlight companies with proven expertise and customer success in these areas through our AWS Competency program. I also want to highlight that today marked the launch of the Healthcare & Life Sciences Category on AWS Marketplace. Through this category, you can find solutions from clinical information systems for healthcare organizations to molecular modeling tools for life science companies that you can procure through AWS Marketplace. Learn more here.
Will you be at HIMSS? Comment below, and please be sure to stop by booth #6969 and chat with us and some of our Healthcare Partners next week. I hope to see you there!