AWS News Blog
AWS and Healthcare: View From the Floor of HIMSS17
Jordin Green is our guest writer today, with an inside view from the floor of HIMSS17.
-Ana
Empathy. It’s not always a word you hear associated with technology but one might argue it should be a central tenet for the application of technology in healthcare, and I was reminded of that fact as I wandered the halls representing AWS at HIMSS17, the Healthcare Information and Management System Society annual meeting.
At Amazon, we’re taught to obsess over our customers, but this obsession takes on a new level of responsibility when those customers are directly working on improving the lives of patients and the overall wellness of society. Thinking about the challenges that healthcare professionals are dealing with every day drives home how important it is for AWS to ensure that using the cloud in healthcare is as frictionless as possible. So with that in mind I wanted to share some of the things I saw in and around HIMSS17 regarding healthcare and AWS.
I started my week at the HIMSS Cloud Computing Forum, which was a new full-day HIMSS pre-day focused on educating the healthcare community on cloud. I was particularly struck by the breadth of cloud use cases being explored throughout the industry, even compared to a few years ago. The program featured presentations on cloud-based care coordination, precision medicine, and security. Perhaps one of the most interesting presentations came from Jessica Kahn from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), talking about the analytics platform that CMS has built in the cloud along with Nuna. Jessica talked about how a cloud-based platform allows CMS to make decisions based on data that is a month old, rather than a year or years old. Additionally, using an automated, rules-based approach, policymakers can directly query the data without having to rely on developers, bringing agility. Nuna has already gained a number of insights from hosting this de-identified Medicaid data for policy research, and is now looking to expand its services to private insurance.
The exhibition opened on Monday, and I was really excited to talk to customers about the new Healthcare & Life Sciences category in the AWS Marketplace. AWS Marketplace is a managed and curated software catalog that helps customers innovate faster and reduce costs, by making it easy to discover, evaluate, procure, immediately deploy and manage 3rd party software solutions. When a customer purchases software via the Marketplace, all of the infrastructure needed to run on AWS is deployed automatically, using the same pay-as-you-go pricing model that AWS uses. Creation of a dedicated category of healthcare is a huge step forward in making it easier for our customers to deploy cloud-based solutions. Our new category features telehealth solutions, products for managing HIPAA compliance, and products that can be used for revenue cycle management from AWS Partner Network (APN) such as PokitDok. We’re just getting started with this category; look for new additions throughout the year.
Later in the week, I tried to spend time at the number of APN Partners exhibiting at HIMSS this year, and it’s safe to say our ecosystem also had lots of moments to shine. Orion Health announced that they will migrate their Amadeus precision medicine platform to the AWS Cloud. Orion has been deploying on top of AWS for a while now, including notably the California-wide Health Information Exchange CalINDEX. Amadeus currently manages 110 million patient records; the migration will represent a significant volume of clinical data running on AWS. New APN Partner Merck announced a new Alexa skill challenge, asking developers to come up with new, innovative ways to use Alexa in the management of chronic disease. Healthcare Competency Partner ClearDATA announced its new fully-managed Containers-as-a-Service product, which simplifies development of healthcare applications by providing developers with a HIPAA-compliant environment for building, testing, and deployment.
This is only a small sample of the activity going on at HIMSS this year, and it’s impossible to capture everything in one post. You learn more about healthcare on AWS on our Cloud Computing in Healthcare page. Nonetheless, after spending four days diving in to healthcare IT, it was great to see how AWS is enabling our healthcare customers and partners deliver solutions that are impacting millions of lives across the globe.