How to Improve Effectiveness of Therapies with AWS

May 24, 2023

In the era defined by rapid technological progress, the healthcare sector is constantly exploring new ways to use digital healthcare solutions for the benefit of driving value-based care. The effectiveness of therapy is a critical component in healthcare as it directly impacts patient outcomes and overall care quality. The ability to track therapy progress, adjust treatment plans based on real-time data, and predict possible outcomes are all essential aspects of effective therapy management. However, these tasks are far from simple and require significant efforts.

And that’s what Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help with. A powerhouse of cloud computing and AI technologies, AWS has vast potential in revolutionizing therapy delivery through better personalization, optimized resource allocation, and streamlined decision-making.

What AWS offers for healthcare

AWS appears to be one of the most adopted cloud platforms in the world, and rightfully so. With over 200 services, they cover everything from computing power to warehousing and database storage to deployment tools to help businesses scale and grow.

In the healthcare sector, AWS offers the tools and services that enable providers and care teams to securely store, process, and analyze clinical information. In addition, AWS’ robust data security measures align with the strict privacy standards required in healthcare, ensuring that sensitive patient data is always protected. The most important AWS services for healthcare include:

Amazon HealthLake is a service that aids healthcare and life sciences sectors in storing and analyzing health data at scale. In addition, HealthLake standardizes health data in the FHIR format, which is widely used for EHRs. By organizing data in a structured way, this HIPAA-compliant service makes it easier for care teams to interpret complex health data.
Amazon SageMaker is a comprehensive service that manages the creation, training, and implementation of advanced ML models. As for the healthcare industry, SageMaker empowers care providers to extract and analyze data from electronic and handwritten documents, detect suspicious healthcare claims, and identify irregularities in medical images, among other things.
AWS IoT is a set of services that connect devices and allow them to interact with AWS’ services and other devices. It can be used to connect wearables and smart medical devices to monitor patient data like heart rate, blood pressure, activity levels in real-time and adjust the treatment plan as needed.
Amazon Comprehend Medical is another HIPAA-eligible NLP service, designed to extract valuable data from unstructured medical documents. Whether it is notes, prescriptions, or clinical trial reports, Comprehend Medical can analyze the text and identify critical data points like medical conditions, treatments, medications and dosages.
Amazon Omics is a dedicated service designed to assist clinicians and scientists in processing vast omics data sets. By taking the heavy-lifting out of bioinformatics workflows, Amazon Omics supports better collaborative research, accelerated clinical trials, and personalized care.
Amazon Transcribe Medical is an ML service that converts medical speech to text. It’s designed to process and transcribe medical consultations, telemedicine calls, dictated notes, and other voice-recorded healthcare notes into a readable format. It can understand and transcribe medical terminology with a great degree of accuracy.
Amazon Athena is a query service enabling straightforward data analysis directly in Amazon S3 via standard SQL. With its serverless nature, there’s no need to manage any infrastructure, making it particularly beneficial for healthcare’s large-scale data analytics because of its capacity to process enormous volumes of data.
AWS Lake Formation is a service that streamlines the process of set up, securing, and management of data lakes that handle both structured and unstructured data, regardless of volume. It offers a unified and consistent perspective of health data while maintaining strict security and access controls. This accessibility and security enables data scientists and analysts to easily deploy their preferred analytics and ML services.

AWS reference architecture for digital therapeutics and precision medicine

AWS CLOUD. Source: AWS

Four ways AWS supports more effective therapies

1. Streamlined patient data management

There is hardly any other industry where access to accurate, up-to-date data is as crucial as in healthcare. By leveraging AWS services, healthcare teams can securely store, process, and analyze vast amounts of patient data, including EHRs, clinical and imaging data. To enable seamless data exchange across different health systems, AWS also supports healthcare interoperability standards such as HL7, FHIR, and DICOM.

2. Enhanced remote patient monitoring

AWS offers robust capabilities in supporting IoT and real-time data analysis to improve remote patient monitoring. With the AWS IoT services, healthcare providers can securely connect and manage countless IoT-enabled medical wearables that track and transfer real-time patient vitals such as blood pressure, heart rate, glucose levels, and more. By identifying changes in the patient’s condition in real-time, interventions can be made immediately, potentially preventing health crises. In addition, remote patient monitoring can boost patient engagement and compliance, as patients can easily see the impact of their behavior on their health metrics.

3. Consistent and effective patient care with predictive analytics

With a combination of services like Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight, healthcare providers can harness the power of predictive analytics to discover underlying patterns, identify the risk of adverse events, and predict patient response to a specific treatment. Moreover, predictive analytics can also aid with resource optimization by anticipating patient flows in hospitals, predicting patient no-shows and readmissions, or identify patients who require additional post-discharge support.

4. Precision medicine for better patient outcomes

A novel approach to care delivery, precision medicine takes into account a person’s whole profile — from medical history and genes to environmental factors and lifestyle — to create a tailored protocol for disease prevention and treatment. The critical component of precision medicine is genomic research. Amazon Omics supports IT-heavy bioinformatics workflows and significantly accelerates the translation of genomic data into actionable insights, enabling healthcare professionals to develop tailored treatment plans.

The bottom line

In the evolving landscape of healthcare, AWS emerges as an indispensable ally, offering an array of services that can transform and enhance therapeutic effectiveness. The power of AWS lies in its ability to leverage data, advanced computing, and AI technologies to provide data-driven, personalized, and efficient therapy options. By streamlining patient data management, enabling real-time remote patient monitoring, facilitating predictive analytics, and accelerating precision medicine, AWS presents vast opportunities for improving patient outcomes and the quality of healthcare.

Kanda has been a trusted partner for healthtech startups and major healthcare providers, delivering top-tier, HIPAA-compliant solutions for over two decades. Our extensive experience spans across key healthcare challenges — from cloud-based healthcare systems to AI-driven healthcare analytics integration to regulatory compliance and interoperability.

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