Innovaccer Improves Healthcare Quality, Reduces Costs Using Data-Driven Insights on AWS

As the healthcare industry undergoes a digital transformation and moves to value-based care, healthcare organizations require open, secure environments to create and maintain unified patient records. However, the lack of a standard format for clinical data makes it difficult to break down data silos and make data-driven decisions that will improve operational and financial outcomes. Innovaccer, a healthcare technology company, decided to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help it build the Innovaccer Health Cloud, a platform that consolidates healthcare data in one place, facilitating healthier patients and communities.

As an AWS Partner, Innovaccer seeks to unify clinical data through the Innovaccer Health Cloud—a full-stack platform for healthcare. For this platform, the company combines its existing data analytics solution with a suite of cloud services to offer payers and providers a fresh approach to drive whole-person care. Using AWS, Innovaccer can standardize and integrate all of its healthcare data sources, including clinical, claims, labs, pharmacy, and even external third-party data sources, such as social determinants of health. “If you talk to most of the data scientists that I’ve been working with, they find they spend much of their time looking for the data, curating the data, and trying to get it into a format that they can actually use,” says Mike Sutten, chief technology officer of Innovaccer. “What Innovaccer has built on AWS is an open yet extremely secure, HIPAA-compliant environment, so we can share the data and protect it.” 

The Innovaccer Health Cloud uses a variety of AWS services to ingest clinical data from many different sources, integrate and standardize the data, and make the information available to its members for use in healthcare settings. To make the data usable, Innovaccer has built a platform based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard for exchanging electronic health records. For its relational database, Innovaccer uses the fully managed Amazon Aurora, which combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost effectiveness of open-source databases. Innovaccer also relies on Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, an extract, transform, load service that reliably captures, transforms, and delivers streaming data to data lakes, data stores, and analytics services. The company uses this solution to develop data delivery streams before applying Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, which is an easy way to transform and analyze data in near real time. “We want to take advantage of the speed and the dynamic scalability of the services that have been built out on AWS,” says Sutten.

By using AWS services, Innovaccer saved a significant amount of time and effort during development. “We used to have to write some of the functions in Python or R,” says Sutten. “Now, it all comes available on AWS.” AWS services are also highly secure, and Innovaccer’s use of them facilitates HIPAA compliance, which helps Innovaccer share health data safely and privately. Moreover, the Innovaccer Health Cloud supports Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standards for industry-standard healthcare data interoperability, and it is developer friendly with the ability to write custom analytics models that can be implemented across applications. 

Innovaccer’s use of AWS services has helped its customers save a combined $600 million by moving away from on-premises solutions with expensive data management tools. These cost savings have helped the company make data-driven decisions that reduce healthcare costs, increase quality of care, and improve collaboration between healthcare stakeholders. “AWS has helped us accelerate delivery into this particular space,” Sutten says.