AWS HealthImaging FAQs

General

You can use AWS HealthImaging as the data management layer for your medical imaging applications while reducing your total cost of ownership (TCO) up to 40%. HealthImaging optimizes your medical imaging data and stores a single, authoritative copy of each image that can be used to drive all of your clinical and research workflows. When creating de-identified copies of an image, pixel data is not copied, saving you storage costs. HealthImaging does this by providing access control at the metadata level and exposing specific attributes of each image (such as patient ID, modality) to applications based on customer-configured permissions. For example, a cloud picture archiving and communication system (PACS) with decision support software will read from the same copy of the data used for disaster recovery and by scientists collaborating on academic research.

HealthImaging supports DICOM, the international standard for the communication and management of medical imaging information.

Security and compliance

HealthImaging is a HIPAA-eligible service. To learn more, explore the list of AWS HIPAA-eligible services. For more information about AWS, the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), and using AWS services to process, store, and transmit protected health information (PHI), see our HIPAA compliance overview.

HealthImaging provides access control at the metadata level, ensuring that each user and application can only see the images and metadata fields that are required based on their role. This prevents the proliferation of patient PHI. All access to HealthImaging APIs is logged in detail and for review in AWS CloudTrail.

You can import data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) into HealthImaging. Customers that are independently managing large archives of DICOM data on premises can use AWS DataSync, AWS Storage Gateway, or the AWS Snow Family to migrate these archives into Amazon S3 and call HealthImaging import APIs to optimize the data for clinical use. Customers with enterprise PACS systems can work with their ISV partners to assist in migrations to HealthImaging.