AWS has unveiled three new enhanced features for Amazon HealthLake, aimed at assisting health IT clients in meeting the latest interoperability standards set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC).
The new capabilities offered by Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service that provides secure data storage, analytics, and exchange, simplify the process of leveraging data from multiple systems, applications, and devices to develop interoperability applications compliant with CMS and ONC regulations.
Customers can now share their data with authorised stakeholders without the need for complicated data exports or the implementation of complex APIs. The goal is to alleviate the burden of building and managing the underlying FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) APIs and data store.
With the SMART on FHIR feature, HealthLake customers gain easier authorisation of users and third-party applications to access FHIR data using OAuth2. They can control access to data and deploy fine-grained access control to ensure authorised access to resources.
HealthLake's FHIR APIs enable the development of interactive applications such as longitudinal medical-record viewers, allowing the organisation of patient medical history across various data modalities, including clinical, imaging, and genomics.
The Patient Access API facilitates the creation of patient- and provider-facing applications by EHR vendors and other health IT developers. These applications can coordinate care, enhance operations, and empower patients by connecting them with their care plans through information exchanged on validated FHIR resources.
For large-scale data transfers, such as payer-to-payer data exchange, Amazon HealthLake offers the FHIR Bulk Data Access API, which securely exports data for all patients, a subset of patients, or all FHIR data stored in the system. Payers can utilise this feature for population health management, while healthcare systems can use it to populate analytics.
The HealthLake Analytics module automates the transformation of transactional FHIR data into a flattened columnar format in Apache Iceberg tables, saving time and effort in building and maintaining complex data pipelines. AWS Analytics and AI/ML services can then analyse the data, enabling use cases such as SQL analytics on clinical data, population health analysis, and clinical decision support.
Greenway Health, among other companies, plans to leverage Amazon HealthLake to accelerate innovation. The managed service allows them to allocate more research and development resources to healthcare innovation, and the integration of domain-specific AWS capabilities offers new opportunities for delivering value to clients.
The SMART on FHIR, patient access API, and FHIR bulk data API export capabilities of Amazon HealthLake are currently available in preview in all regions where the service is generally accessible.
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