Customer Stories / Healthcare

2020
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A Tour of Philips HealthSuite Platform Powered by AWS

To help the healthcare industry innovate to improve patient outcomes even faster, Philips built HealthSuite Digital Platform—an orchestrated collection of ready-to-use cloud platform services—on AWS.  

Security and privacy compliance

Baked-in security and privacy compliance for the healthcare sector

Simple connectivity

For clinical-grade devices

Easy-to-deploy

Healthcare-specific databases

Standards-based interoperability

Of healthcare systems

Certified compliance

With regulations such as ISO 27001/18, SOC 2, and HITRUST

Overview

Philips HealthSuite Platform offers a series of discrete services to help its customers support legacy applications and develop innovative solutions. It also provides access and identity management, scalable Internet of Things (IoT) services, data management and analysis, plus more specialized services that don’t apply as universally as the core services. The services are packaged to minimize the upfront development cost and maximize ease of use. The underlying technology takes full advantage Amazon Web Services (AWS) capabilities that extend from the cloud to the edge, including the global network of AWS hyperscale data centers and the specialized data-management, AI/analytics, and other leading-edge compute services AWS offers.

“At its core, HealthSuite Platform provides a broad range of orchestrated cloud platform services we've developed on top of AWS infrastructure,” says Dale Wiggins, vice president and general manager of HealthSuite Platform at Philips. “Customers choose what they need and pay only for what they use, similar to the AWS model.”

Philips case study

HealthSuite Platform consists of a regulatory-compliant cloud infrastructure and a set of open, highly secure, platform-as-a-service capabilities that enable Philips teams and external customers to easily connect devices as well as collect, aggregate, store, and analyze electronic health data. Built natively on AWS, which offers a single programming model and native integration from local edge devices to the cloud, HealthSuite Platform uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances as compute resources, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object storage, and AWS IoT Core for connectivity.

Opportunity | Security and Regulatory Controls for the Healthcare Space

Every AWS customer needs secure identity and access management. HealthSuite Platform extends those capabilities beyond standard AWS services to provide its customers with security designed for the higher standard required of healthcare organizations. The HealthSuite Information Security Management System, for example, includes privacy and security controls that fulfill US HIPAA regulations, and it offers extensive compliance certifications including ISO 27001/18, SOC 2, and HITRUST.

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By running Philips HealthSuite Platform on AWS, we're able to provide our customers with the power, security, and flexibility of AWS services with the healthcare-specific added value we've built on top."

Dale Wiggins
Vice President and General Manager of Philips HealthSuite Platform, Philips

Solution | Hosting for Legacy and Cloud-Native Healthcare Applications

The first category of HealthSuite Platform services that many users encounter is HealthSuite Host, which offers services for hosting both legacy and new cloud-native applications and for continuously monitoring their performance and health. “HealthSuite Host is a mixture of services we've built, access to third-party databases, and service brokers from AWS,” says Wiggins. “Using Host, customers can access AWS services with baked-in controls and capabilities specific to the healthcare space, running on our regulatory-compliant infrastructure.”

Identity, Access, and Consent

Using HealthSuite Authorize, Philips customers and partners can use access identity, access management, authorization, and consent services designed specifically for the healthcare space. “HealthSuite Authorize takes into account issues like the consent framework required for healthcare, identity federation needs within a health system, and the many data needs across healthcare roles,” says Wiggins.

Connectivity for Clinical-Grade Devices

Philips customers use HealthSuite Connect for highly secure, scalable IoT services they can use to manage, monitor, update, and collect data from smart devices. “For HealthSuite Connect, we started with multiple AWS IoT Core features such as Device Gateway and Rules Engine as well as AWS IoT Core policies, and we adapted them to be an even stronger fit for healthcare environments,” says Wiggins. “HealthSuite Connect enables our customers to identify, communicate with, upgrade, and monitor clinical-grade devices and consumer wellness devices. We also offer cloud-to-cloud integrations with a variety of providers to save developers the work of having to build these integrations themselves.”

Cloud Repositories for Clinical Data

Health systems and their partners can take advantage of HealthSuite Store to manage and archive consumer and clinical data from disparate sources in the platform's encrypted, cloud-hosted Clinical Data Repository, Telemetry Data Repository, and Object Storage Repository. “HealthSuite Store solves data problems that are unique to healthcare organizations, such as access restrictions, retention duration, and specific data formats,” says Wiggins. “We've evolved our databases over four years to be able to model all the types of healthcare-specific data, ranging from continuous data from devices to DICOM medical imaging information.”

The data repositories provide Philips customers with off-the-shelf simplicity similar to the AWS offerings they're built on, including Amazon S3, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Redshift. “We've built preconfigured databases and APIs around healthcare standards and requirements,” says Ad Dijkhoff, head of HealthSuite Platform business development at Philips. “Just like with deploying an AWS-based database, in just a few clicks customers have a database suitable for healthcare data, with controlled access, consent management, and all the other needed guardrails built right in.”

Healthcare Standards-Based Interoperability

Philips teams and customers can turn to HealthSuite Share for standards-based interoperability between apps, devices, and third-party systems using FHIR, HL7, and IHE profiles. “After organizations have their data in the cloud, they'll start thinking about sharing it,” says Wiggins. “A key Share capability is IO Bridge, which simplifies mapping, ingesting, and transforming data so it can be exchanged within enterprise systems. It's very straightforward to work with because it has a flexible API-based framework.”

Processing Healthcare Big Data

HealthSuite Analyze provides a big data processing framework for ingesting, managing, and analyzing healthcare data. Wiggins says, “Our platform can ingest very large volumes of data and house it in either a Hadoop-based data lake or one that is designed for smaller volumes of data and for structured data that doesn't necessitate the overhead of a Hadoop-based system. The Analyze Insights service supports the development and testing of algorithms, such as for clinical trials.”

Outcome | Philips HealthSuite Platform on AWS: A Powerful Combination

The combination of AWS and HealthSuite Platform provides the capabilities to bring innovative healthcare solutions to market faster than ever. Wiggins concludes, “By running Philips HealthSuite Platform on AWS, we're able to provide our customers with the power, security, and flexibility of AWS services with the healthcare-specific added value we've built on top.”

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/health.

About Philips

Philips is a leading health technology company focused on improving people's health and enabling better outcomes along a continuum from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, treatment, and home care. Philips leverages advanced technology as well as deep clinical and consumer insights to deliver integrated solutions.

AWS Services Used

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

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Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

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AWS IoT Core

AWS IoT Core is a managed cloud service that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices. AWS IoT Core can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely.

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Amazon RDS

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

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