re:Invent Top 10 Announcements for Healthcare & Life Sciences

Healthcare and life sciences organizations are reinventing how they collaborate, make data driven clinical and operational decisions, enable precision medicine, and decrease the cost of care. AWS for Health, a curated offering of AWS services and AWS Partner Network solutions designed for healthcare and life sciences customers, provides proven and easily accessible capabilities that help to increase the pace of innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized approaches to therapeutic development and care.

At re:Invent this year, we continued to expand these offerings by announcing new services and new capabilities to existing services. And while there were hundreds of launches and announcements of new services and major features across all industries, the AWS for Health team created this top 10 list specifically for the most compelling announcements for Healthcare and Life Sciences organizations.

Top 10 Announcements for Healthcare & Life Sciences:

1. By far, the most exciting announcement for Healthcare and Life Sciences was the launch of AWS Private 5G, which allows you to build private cellular networks to take advantage of the technology benefits of 5G while maintaining the security and granular application and device controls of a private network. For healthcare, this means you can connect thousands of wellness and medical devices with the low latency and high bandwidth of a private 5G network. You can also integrate with existing IT policies, scale your network capacity on demand, add devices with a few clicks, and pay only for the capacity and throughput you use. For life sciences manufacturing, AWS Private 5G offers a new way to connect devices, sensors, machines, and legacy equipment to track assembly line production in real-time with reliable data linkage across connected machines. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

2. New hardware announced, including AWS Graviton3 and Amazon EC2 M6i for Epic on AWS. AWS Graviton3 is the latest generation of AWS-designed Arm-based processors that provide the best price performance for workloads on Amazon EC2. AWS Graviton3 processors deliver up to 25% better compute performance, up to 2x higher floating-point performance, and up to 2x faster cryptographic workload performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors. Additionally, Graviton3 processors deliver up to 3x better performance compared to Graviton2 processors for ML workloads, including support for bfloat16. Also, enhanced capabilities with AmazonEC2 M6i for Epic provides a new instance size (m6i.32xlarge) that includes 160,000 IOPS, paired with 128 vCPUs and 512 GB of memory, and encryption in-transit between other similar EC2 instances. The m6i provides 33% more memory and 20% higher memory bandwidth compared to M5 instances.  The price and performance of the M6i makes it a perfect fit for high-performance, mission-critical systems like Epic on AWS. With this new instance, AWS provides the performance required by large health systems while also reducing total cost of operation. Read the launch blog for AWS Graviton3, and watch the session.

3. AWS IoT TwinMaker allows you to use your existing IoT, video, and enterprise application data where it already lives—without needing to re-ingest or move the data to another location. Save time with an automatically generated knowledge graph that binds your data sources to virtual replicas of physical systems to accurately model real-world environments. This lets operations teams in hospitals, R&D organizations, and life sciences manufacturing get an immersive 3D view of instruments and equipment, and view operations metrics to optimize efficiency, increase production, and improve performance. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

4. Amazon Inspector is a vulnerability management solution that is native, easy to deploy, and highly scalable. The new Amazon Inspector takes a unique approach to vulnerability management by offering continual vulnerability monitoring compared to the traditional periodic assessment model. For healthcare, this can enhance your cybersecurity posture; for medical device manufacturers, this can support the risk management strategy for regulated devices. Amazon Inspector automatically discovers all workloads and continually scans them for vulnerabilities, thereby providing vulnerability information to customers in near-real time without any manual overhead. It then correlates up-to-date common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) information with factors like network accessibility to create meaningful risk scores that help you prioritize vulnerable resources to address. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

5. Amazon EMR Serverless is a serverless option in Amazon EMR that makes it easy for data analysts and engineers to run open source big data analytics frameworks without configuring, managing, and scaling clusters or servers. You get all of the features and benefits of Amazon EMR, without the need for experts to plan and manage clusters. Read the launch blog, and watch the session. Similarly, Amazon Redshift Serverless is a serverless option (preview) to run and scale analytics without having to provision and manage data warehouse clusters. With Amazon Redshift Serverless, all users including data analysts, developers, and data scientists can now use Amazon Redshift to get insights from data in seconds. Now, you can focus on getting to insights from data in and not think about managing your data warehouse infrastructure. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

6. Amazon SageMaker Canvas expands access to machine learning (ML) by providing business analysts with a visual point-and-click interface that allows you to generate accurate ML predictions on your own — without requiring any machine learning experience or having to write a single line of code. With SageMaker Canvas, you can quickly connect and access data from cloud and on-premises data sources, combine datasets, and create unified datasets for training ML models. SageMaker Canvas automatically detects and corrects data errors and analyzes data readiness for ML. Read the launch blog, and watch the session. With this, we also announced Amazon SageMaker Serverless Inference to easily deploy ML models for inference without configuring or managing any of the underlying infrastructure. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

7. AWS Mainframe Modernization is a unique platform that allows you to migrate your on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed runtime environment on AWS. AWS Mainframe Modernization enables two popular migration patterns: re-platforming and automated refactoring. You can assess and analyze migration readiness and plan projects. Once implemented and tested, you can deploy your mainframe workloads to AWS into the AWS Mainframe Modernization managed runtime environment. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

8. AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. Lake Formation introduces three new capabilities that simplify building, securing, and managing data lakes, including Lake Formation Governed Tables, which simplifies building resilient data pipelines with multi-table transaction support. Governed Tables monitor and automatically optimize how data is stored so query times are consistent and fast. AWS Lake Formation also now supports row- and cell-level permissions, making it easier to restrict access to sensitive information by granting users access to only the portions of the data they have permissions to see. For biopharma organizations that manage data across R&D, manufacturing, and commercial, these tools provide flexibility, performance, and control when implementing an enterprise data strategy. Watch the session.

9. Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class is an archive storage class that delivers the lowest cost storage for long-lived data that is rarely accessed and requires retrieval in milliseconds. Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the fastest access to archive storage, with the same throughput and milliseconds access as the S3 Standard storage class. It is designed for rarely accessed data that still needs immediate access in performance-sensitive use cases like medical imaging and health records, scientific data, and genomics. Read the launch blog, and watch the session.

10. AWS Local Zones International Expansion — New AWS Local Zones are now available in over 26 metros in over 21 countries worldwide. These new AWS Local Zones will be made available starting in 2022 and join the Local Zones in 16 metros across the US, allowing customers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users or for on-premises installations. Customers can deliver ultra-low latency applications to end users in cities across the US with generally available AWS Local Zones in 13 metro areas – Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Philadelphia, and Portland and three more AWS Local Zones launching later in 2022 in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Seattle. With over 26 new AWS Local Zones coming in cities like Amsterdam, Athens, Bangalore, Berlin, Bogota, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Chennai, Delhi, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Kolkata, Lisbon, Manila, Munich, Nairobi, Oslo, Perth, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Toronto, Vancouver, Vienna, and Warsaw, customers will be able to deliver ultra-low latency applications to end users or for on-premises installations in cities around the world starting in 2022. Read more about AWS Local Zones.

In addition to these announcements, we had many presentations from customers just like you and want to make sure you have the information to view their sessions and continue to learn from each other. You can access these breakout sessions by logging into the re:Invent Virtual Event platform on-demand:

• Revolutionizing colorectal cancer with detection innovation at Medtronic (On-demand)
• Accelerate pediatric research with ML and healthcare interoperability at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (On-demand)
• Delivering life-changing medicines at AstraZeneca with data and AI (On-demand)
• How Baxter has innovated digital health connectivity with AWS (On-demand)
• Anthem HealthOS platform: The future of health data interoperability (On-demand)
• How cloud facilitates digital transformation at Baptist Health (On-demand)
• Inside Johnson & Johnson’s cloud transformation (On-demand) and Bold plans, big results: Johnson & Johnson’s data warehouse migration (On-demand)
• Make sense of your health data with Amazon HealthLake (On-demand)
• Innovating for digital health equity- featuring UC Davis (On-demand)
• Improving the human experience in healthcare with Olive (On-demand)

Gilead & AWS Announcement: Gilead and AWS Collaborate on Development and Delivery of New Medicines for Patients. With AWS as its preferred cloud provider, Gilead uses AWS machine learning and analytics to better inform clinical trial design and advance data-driven decision making, while prioritizing patient privacy and security. Gilead also transforms its enterprise resource planning workloads on AWS to implement SAP S/4HANA across its global business.

Roche & AWS Announcement: AWS Supports Roche in Harnessing the Power of Health Data at Scale. One of the world’s largest healthcare companies uses AWS technology to facilitate secure research collaboration, deliver new diagnostic technologies, and unlock insights from health data to improve patient care and health outcomes.

Pfizer & AWS Announcement: AWS Helps Pfizer Accelerate Drug Development and Clinical Manufacturing. AWS works with Pfizer to support more rapid innovation and improved clinical manufacturing operations to help develop tomorrow’s therapies.

UC Davis Announcement: New initiative to make UC Davis Health a leader in digital medicine. Launch of world’s first Cloud Innovation Center based at an academic medical center.

As always, re:Invent was an event to remember with AWS showing its continued commitment to innovation. For HCLS organizations, the addition of game-changing technologies, such as AWS Private 5G and Amazon Inspector, make it clear that AWS is working hard to help solve the most pressing needs of a challenging industry. We look forward to continuing to innovate with and for our Healthcare and Life Sciences customers and partners in 2022!

To learn more about how AWS for Health services and solutions are used by customers globally visit, https://aws.amazon.com/health/.