Introducing the Healthcare Industry Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Cloud workloads can unlock information contained within a health dataset through comprehensive analytics, or can use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to prioritize treatments and predict health outcomes. Health providers are hosting electronic health record (EHR) and revenue cycle management (RCM) systems that use cloud technology to improve performance while reducing cost.

These are just some of the many ways that our customers are already utilizing AWS to improve patient care, all while keeping health information secure and private. To succeed and leverage these new methods of care, healthcare organizations depend on highly secure, private, scalable, and reliable infrastructure to ensure continual access to their most critical applications.

AWS is excited to announce the launch of the Healthcare Industry Lens of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The Healthcare Industry Lens is a collection of customer-proven design principles and best practices that help you adopt a cloud-native approach to building and operating healthcare workloads. The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides guidance across six pillars:

• Operational excellence: the ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value, and continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
• Security: the confidence to meet your business and regulatory requirements by creating architectures that protect health data, control access, and respond automatically to security events.
• Reliability: architecting a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. This includes the capacity to operate and test the workload through its total lifecycle.
• Performance efficiency: the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements, while maintaining that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
• Cost optimization: the continual process of refinement and improvement of a system over its entire lifecycle―from the initial design to the ongoing operation of production workloads. Adopting recommended practices enable you to build and operate cost-aware systems that achieve business outcomes and minimize costs, allowing your business to maximize its return on investment.
• Sustainability: understanding the environmental impact of cloud workloads, how to quantify impacts through the workload lifecycle, and how to apply design principles that help minimize these impacts.

Who should use the Healthcare Industry Lens?

The Healthcare Industry Lens is intended for those in technology roles, such as:

• Chief technology officers (CTOs)
• Chief information security officers (CISOs)
• Architects, developers
• Compliance officers
• Operations team members

After reading the Healthcare Industry Lens, you will understand AWS best practices and strategies to use when designing architectures for the development and deployment of healthcare applications. This Lens augments the Well-Architected Framework and highlights additional key principles that should be considered for healthcare workloads. The Lens also includes a Learning Path for Healthcare section featuring a series of foundational resources that can prepare you to use the Healthcare Industry Lens.

Next Steps

With the release of the Healthcare Industry Lens, we encourage our customers to download and read the document, as well as implement and test their workloads in accordance with the recommendations contained in the Healthcare Industry Lens. We also recommend that you study the preliminary resources listed in the healthcare learning path section, like the AWS Well-Architected Framework whitepaper.

As you review the Lens, we would appreciate your comments and feedback to help us improve the Healthcare Industry Lens as healthcare and technology evolve. We will continually refresh the content as we identify new best practices, requirements, and common scenarios that impact the healthcare industry.

You can find the Healthcare Industry Lens whitepaper at the AWS Well-Architected website and can contact your AWS Account team for more information.