AWS re:Invent 2019 – Healthcare and life sciences industry recap

With over 75 launches and announcements of new services and major features during re:Invent, it can be hard for any technologist to keep track of the most relevant information for Healthcare and Life Science (HCLS) workloads. Explore the below recap of information important for HCLS customers and links to the top re:Invent breakout sessions.

Top five announcements for healthcare, life sciences, and genomics customers

1. Amazon Transcribe Medical

Amazon Transcribe Medical is a service that converts medical speech to text, making it easy for developers to integrate medical transcription into applications that help physicians do clinical documentation efficiently. In clinical documentation workflow, physicians can more efficiently capture medical notes, and bring focus back to their engagement with their patient. Moreover, physicians can leverage the transcribed notes after patient encounters to more quickly conduct medical data entry into electronic health record (EHR) systems. Webpage | Blog | Customer Stories

2. AWS Data Exchange

AWS Data Exchange makes it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. Pharmaceutical companies, healthcare providers, and health insurers can better plan clinical trials, build insurance plans, support sponsored research for new drugs, and improve patient lives by combining their own data with products they subscribe to on AWS Data Exchange. Some relevant products contain data on simulated clinical data, drug switching patterns, fitness benchmarks, life expectancy benchmarks, aggregated claims data, and more. Webpage | Blog | Video

3. Amazon SageMaker

Multiple new service features were launched for Amazon SageMaker, including Autopilot, Debugger, Experiments, Model Monitor, Notebooks, Studio, and Processing.

In healthcare and life sciences we would specifically highlight the following updates: Webpage

Amazon SageMaker Studio: Fully integrated development environment for machine learning, allowing you to build, train, debug, track, and monitor your models programmatically. Blog
Amazon SageMaker Notebooks: Spin up machine learning notebooks in seconds, and share notebooks with just a single click to simplify collaborations and reproducibility across your organization. Blog
Amazon SageMaker Debugger: Analyze and debug ML models in real time by automatically identifying complex issues developing in training jobs. Blog

4. AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid. Easily apply analytics and machine learning AWS services to health management systems that need to remain on premises due to low latency processing or patient health information (PHI) requirements. Many pharma manufacturing companies use AWS services to run process control systems such as MES and SCADA systems and applications that need to run close to factory floor equipment. Seamlessly integrate these on-premises applications with services running in the AWS Region for centralized operations. Webpage | Blog | Video

5. Amazon Kendra

Highly accurate and easy-to-use enterprise search service that’s powered by machine Kendra lets scientists use powerful natural language search capabilities to so they can more easily find the information they need within the vast amount of information spread across a biotech/pharma company. Webpage | Blog | Customer Stories

Customer news and announcements

Press Release: AWS Announces Strategic Collaboration with Novartis to Accelerate Digital Transformation of Its Business Operations. Leading pharmaceutical company leverages AWS’s broadest portfolio of cloud services to build an enterprise-wide data and analytics platform that will change the way that medicines are manufactured and delivered.

Press Release: Cerner Names AWS as Its Preferred Cloud and Machine Learning Provider. Cerner will leverage AWS comprehensive machine learning and analytics services to gain new clinical and business insights that have the potential to significantly improve the delivery of patient care. By running their workloads on AWS, Cerner will drive a new era of health system interoperability and data portability to improve health outcomes across the continuum of care.

Listen to Cerner CEO, Brent Schafer talk about using AWS to Transform Healthcare

Other services important for HCLS

Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances

Inf1 instances to deliver up to 3x higher throughput and up to 40% lower cost per inference than Amazon EC2 G4 instances, which were already the lowest cost instance for machine learning inference available in the cloud. Machine learning in healthcare enables physicians to treat patients more quickly, and in biopharma to more efficiently develop new therapies. These technologies allow HCLS organizations to not only cut costs, but also improve patient outcomes. Webpage | Blog

Amazon Braket

Amazon Braket is a fully managed service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place. Braket lets customers explore, evaluate, and experiment with quantum computing hardware to gain in-house experience as they plan for the future. Quantum computing has the potential to impact many areas of healthcare, life sciences, and genomics. These advancements will likely be realized through continued quantum computing research and experimentation conducted by a collaborative of educational institutions, enterprises, and governments. Webpage | Blog

Amazon Connect & Contact Lens for Connect

Amazon Connect is an easy to use omnichannel cloud contact center that helps companies provide superior customer service at a lower cost. Contact Lens for Amazon Connect expands the capability of Amazon Connect by integrating ML analytics capabilities that gives contact centers the ability to understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations to improve customer experience and identify crucial customer feedback. As healthcare and life sciences organizations continue to drive towards a more personalized care experience technologies such as these speed the development of customer-centric solutions like a digital front door. Webpage | Blog

AWS Nitro Enclaves

AWS Nitro Enclaves enables customers to create isolated compute environments to further protect and securely process highly sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII) in healthcare, biopharma, and genomics. Webpage

AQUA for Amazon Redshift

AQUA is a new distributed and hardware accelerated cache that allows Redshift to run up to 10x faster than any other cloud data warehouse, reducing data management challenges and processing bottlenecks that are frequently encountered in personalized healthcare initiatives, and in compute-intensive and data-intensive biomedical workloads. Webpage | AQUA Preview

AWS Identity and Access Management Access Analyzer

AWS IAM Access Analyzer generates comprehensive findings that identify resources that can be accessed from outside an AWS account. Provides the highest levels of security assurance and continuously monitors to help customer refine permissions to help ensure critical healthcare and life sciences data is not inappropriately accessed. Webpage | Blog