Amazon marshals partners, providers behind major move into medical imaging
Cloud giant Amazon Web Services is expanding its 1½ -year-old HealthLake data-management service in two imaging-specific directions. In the process it’s drawing vocal buy-in from healthcare providers as well as imaging vendors.
In a Nov. 15 blog post, AWS introduces Amazon HealthLake Imaging, which facilitates end-to-end management of radiological image data at scale, and Amazon HealthLake Analytics, which enables sophisticated data crunching across specialties within provider enterprises.
The post is co-authored by Tehsin Syed, AWS’s GM of Health AI, and Taha Kass-Hout, MD, the company’s CMO and VP of machine learning. Syed is a former engineering VP at Cerner. Kass-Hout served the Obama administration as the FDA’s first chief health informatics officer.
Imaging at Home in the Cloud
The pair describe HealthLake Imaging as a HIPAA-eligible capability that “makes it easy to store, access and analyze medical images at petabyte scale. This new capability is designed for fast, sub-second medical image retrieval in your clinical workflows that you can access securely from anywhere … and with high availability.”
They note the exponential growth of medical image data over the past decade—5.5 billion studies per year, average image dataset per study 150 megabytes—against the gathering worldwide radiologist shortage.
Syed and Kass-Hout state HealthLake Imaging lets end-users read and analyze image data from a single encrypted copy stored in the cloud with normalized metadata and advanced compression.
“As a result, it is estimated that HealthLake Imaging helps [healthcare providers] reduce the total cost of medical imaging storage by up to 40%,” they write.
Analytics the Amazon Way
For its part, AWS’s HealthLake Analytics automatically normalizes raw health data from all manner of sources into a format that’s interoperable across health IT environments and ready to support AI-powered analysis for deep clinical insights, the Nov. 15 announcement suggests.
The resulting outputs are of course immediately compatible with Amazon Athena for SQL database searching.
The system also serves up dashboard interactivity with Amazon QuickSight and AI-powered clinical predictions with Amazon SageMaker.
Syed and Kass-Hout claim HealthLake Analytics “makes it easy to query and derive insights from multi-modal health data at scale, at the individual or population levels, with the ability to share data securely across the enterprise and enable advanced analytics and machine learning in just a few clicks.”
Industry Partners All In, Healthcare Providers Enthused
Apropos to the launch of the two overlapping offerings, Kass-Hout heads up the company’s overall health AI strategy and will oversee HealthLake itself.
Syed leads AWS’s health AI engineering and product development efforts, including Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon Health.
The duo’s blog post quotes several imaging-industry partners of note who are working with AWS to launch HealthLake Imaging and thereby “accelerate adoption of cloud-native solutions to help transition enterprise imaging workflows to the cloud and accelerate [healthcare providers’] pace of innovation.”
Several of these partner companies are promoting the new HealthLake launches of their own accord. For samplings, click one or more: Intelerad, Konica Minolta Healthcare, Radical Imaging, Axial3D.
Offering testimonials from the healthcare provider perspective are imaging informatics leaders from Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands and the University of Maryland Medical Intelligent Imaging Center (UM2ii).
The latter was “formed to unite innovators, thought leaders and scientists across academics and industry,” says UM2ii director Paul Yi, MD, in the Syed/Kass-Hout blog post. “Our work with AWS will accelerate our mission to push the boundaries of medical imaging AI.”
AWS launched HealthLake in July 2021. The Nov. 15 imaging/analytics announcement arrives a month after Google Cloud launched a platform similarly aimed at accelerating data interoperability and AI adoption in medical imaging.
Full AWS blog post here.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.