Cloud Computing For Health — AWS for Health Rolls Out Amazon HealthLake

By | July 21, 2021
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From FierceHealth Jul-2021

Amazon rolls out AWS For Health cloud services for healthcare, genomics and biopharma

Amazon’s cloud division has rolled out AWS for Health, a set of services and partner solutions for healthcare, genomics and biopharma.

Amazon says the portfolio of solutions will help to accelerate innovation from “benchtop to bedside” as the tech giant pushes further into the healthcare and life sciences markets.

AWS for Health provides “proven and easily accessible capabilities” that help organizations increase the pace of innovation, unlock the potential of health data, and develop more personalized approaches to therapeutic development and care, Patrick Combes, director, head of technology – healthcare and life sciences at Amazon Web Services (AWS), wrote in a blog post.

The services within AWS for Health can help healthcare customers create holistic electronic health records to help clinicians make data-driven care plans and power population genomic initiatives to expand precision medicine accessibility, as two examples, Combes wrote.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are all pushing deeper into healthcare in a battle to provide cloud computing and data storage technology to hospitals.

RELATED: Amazon launches new tool to help healthcare organizations standardize data

Read full article From FierceHealth Jul-2021

About Amazon HealthLake

Amazon HealthLake is a HIPAA-eligible service enabling healthcare and life sciences companies to securely store, transform, query, and analyze health data at scale. With HealthLake, you pay as you go with no upfront costs. You are billed from the time you create your Data Store, which helps you index all your information in the FHIR format so it can be easily queried, to the time you delete it. You are charged by the hour for your Data Store, which includes data import up to 10 GB of data storage, and the first 3,500 queries per hour across all of your Data Stores. The Data Store is always running, offering you the ability to query the information anytime with FHIR query operations.

With integrated medical NLP, you can automatically extract entities (e.g., medical procedures, medications), entity relationships (e.g., a medication and its dosage), entity traits (e.g., positive or negative test result, time of procedure), and Protected Health Information (PHI) data from your medical text. You can also export FHIR data from HealthLake to Amazon S3 where data can be used in further downstream applications.

To get started with Amazon HealthLake, from 7/15/2021 – 9/30/2021 customers will be charged only for their active Data Stores at $0.27 per data store hour. Data Store size will be fixed at 500GB. There are no additional charges for storage, FHIR queries, integrated NLP, and FHIR data export. Starting 10/01/2021, charges as described in the pricing page will apply.

Pricing details

Data Store

The Data Store helps you index all your information in the FHIR format for easy querying. Data import and your first 10 GB of storage are included across all of your Data Stores. The Data Store is always running, offering you the ability to query the information anytime, so you are charged by the hour. You are charged $0.27 per Data Store hour. Amazon HealthLake monitors your data consumption and allocates additional searchable data storage to meet your needs. Durable primary storage and index scaling are included in this price. For additional data storage above the 10 GB included across your Data Stores, you are charged $0.25 per GB stored per month, rounded up to the nearest GB in addition to the per hour charge. For example, if you stored 10.5 GB, you are charged for 1 additional GB since 10 GB is included.

Query

HealthLake supports FHIR query operations. You can query records by creating an operation, such as adding new patients and their medication information. You can also read, update, or delete a previously created record. As per the FHIR specification, deleted data is only hidden from analysis and results; it is not deleted from the service, only versioned. You can also search with predefined filters to find all patient information. The first 3,500 queries per hour are included across your Data Stores. For any additional query capacity, you are charged $0.015 per 10,000 queries per hour, rounded up to the nearest 10,000.