Welcome to Healthcare and Life Sciences Week on the APN Blog!

By Oxana Pickeral. Oxana is the Global Segment Leader for Healthcare & Life Sciences at AWS. 

Organizations around the globe are moving to the AWS Cloud to capture the many benefits of the cloud that extend beyond the well-established cost effectiveness, flexibility, security, and agility of on-demand storage, compute power, database management, and content delivery. With AWS, healthcare and life sciences organizations gain the ability to innovate and provide better services for their business customers and patients than ever before: from integrating genomics in clinical care to better decision support analytics throughout the biopharma and med tech R&D life cycle, to the growing range of consumer and industrial IoT applications, our opportunities to transform care delivery and develop new cures are endless – and firms in the AWS Partner Network (APN) are vital to driving this innovation at scale.

Innovation in the AWS Cloud

Agility and speed of innovation are among the key reasons organizations are moving to the cloud. In a fast-paced world where the pace of change in the market continues to accelerate, the ability to innovate and rapidly scale successful experiments is vital. This is no different in healthcare and life sciences.

Value-based payment requirements and health IT interoperability gains drive new care delivery models. Cloud-based health information exchanges, population management platforms, and electronic health records, enhanced with patient-generated behavioral and medical-grade sensor data, can support better care decisions by multiple health care providers and health plans to improve patient outcomes. ERP platforms for payers and providers help control the revenue cycle and manage costs across the health care system.

In life sciences, data-rich global collaboration environments allow sharing and analysis of genomic, imaging, and clinical outcomes data to enable scientific discoveries and better inform product development decisions. Next-generation business intelligence solutions increasingly incorporate rich operational and market data, including cloud-based industrial IoT solutions deployed in manufacturing and supply chains to improve quality and optimize operations.

Security and Compliance are Foundational

In order for healthcare and life sciences firms to innovate at scale while managing their security and compliance requirements, they need a secure environment that supports applicable laws and regulatory frameworks to integrate innovative solutions with core business systems and workloads. At AWS, security is the highest priority, and customers can benefit from a data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. AWS approaches security through the Shared Responsibility Model, in which AWS manages security of the cloud, and security in the cloud is the responsibility of the customer. Through the Shared Responsibility Model, customers retain control of what security they choose to implement to protect their own content, platform, applications, systems and networks, no differently than they would in an on-site datacenter.

Customers have told us that they’re increasingly hard pressed to match the security they’re able to achieve on the AWS Cloud in their on-premises environments (check out a number of compliance testimonials here). As customers architect for their specific requirements, AWS provides a large number of assurance programs, helping the cloud become the new normal for GxP, HIPAA, HITRUST, and data provenance workloads.

APN Partners Drive Innovation at Scale

The AWS Partner Network (APN), with tens of thousands of firms worldwide, is a significant driver of innovation, especially in specialized industry verticals such as healthcare and life sciences. Consulting and Technology Partners with deep understanding of customers engaged in biomedical discovery, product development, care delivery, and patient management bring differentiated capabilities and can be recognized through the AWS Competency Program if they demonstrate technical proficiency on AWS and proven customer success in this field. Check out our Healthcare and Life Sciences Competency pages to learn more about these APN Partners.

Our Healthcare and Life Sciences Competency Partners are frequently featured during AWS events, such as AWS Summits and re:Invent, along with industry events (look for the “Powered by AWS” logo at HIMSS next week), and in the upcoming blog posts you’ll see all this week.

The Healthcare and Life Sciences Week Preview

Over the course of the next week, several of our HCLS Competency Partners and our team will share their insights and practical tips for building innovative solutions in the healthcare and life sciences space and meeting compliance requirements on AWS. On February 14th, we will cover GxP in more depth and feature a guest post from Premier APN Consulting Partner and Healthcare and Life Sciences Competency Partner Cognizant who will discuss design principles for GxP and the company’s Transformation Framework.

On February 15th, we’ll dive into greater detail of HIPAA and HITRUST. Our three guest blogs will be authored by AWS Partner Solutions Architect Aaron Friedman, who is focused on the HCLS segment. Aaron will first discuss experienced Healthcare Competency Partners ClearDATA and hc1.com. The ClearDATA post will focus on HITRUST and discuss the company’s expertise in applying DevSecOps principles on AWS. The second APN Partner-focused post features APN Technology Partner hc1.com. It will detail the hc1 Platform and the team’s approach to HIPAA on AWS. In the third post, Aaron will discuss Premier APN Consulting Partner and Life Sciences Competency Partner REAN. Aaron will provide details about REAN’s approach to logging, monitoring, and continuous compliance, and the importance of automation in this space.

Thursday, February 16th will feature a post from the AWS Marketplace team and a post that discusses AWS Healthcare and DevOps Competency Partner Cloudticity. Aaron will discuss how Cloudticity uses automation to scale healthcare solutions for a range of customers on the AWS Cloud. In another post, Aaron will discuss additional Healthcare and Life Sciences Partner solutions on AWS.

To close out the week, we’ll recap the week’s highlights, look onward to HIMSS, and share practical tips and best practices for being an APN Partner.

We look forward to starting a deeper conversation with you (do you have any questions or thoughts on the topic? Please click the comment link!), and we hope that you find this series of blogs valuable.