AWS took a major step to bolster its cloud value proposition with the launch of Amazon HealthLake Imaging, a new HIPAA-eligible capability that addresses some of cloud imaging’s most common pain points. We sat down with AWS AI leader, Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, at HLTH 2022 last week to explore Amazon HealthLake Imaging’s potential impact on radiology.
Amazon HealthLake Imaging allows healthcare organizations to run multiple applications from a single authoritative copy of an image’s data that’s stored in the cloud, while giving each on-site application customizable metadata-level image access (e.g., patient ID, modality), and returning specially-encoded/compressed images to facilitate faster transfer. As a result…
- Healthcare providers can cut their image storage TCO by 40% by eliminating the storage creep that comes from saving the same images to the cloud multiple times
- Radiologists can retrieve and load imaging data from the cloud with sub-second latencies
- Image viewers and AI algorithms can present or analyze the contents of a DICOM study faster, because they don’t have to load unnecessary image data
- Researchers and developers can create de-identified image copies, without copying pixel data (and having to store that extra data)
- AI development teams can access DICOM metadata in a developer-friendly format
Although AWS already plays a major role in radiology, this is one of very few imaging-targeted launch announcements that we’ve seen from the cloud giant. It also comes one month after Google Cloud similarly made its most public cloud imaging announcement in recent memory.
- Considering that medical imaging is responsible for roughly 90% of healthcare data, the recent surge in cloud imaging announcements suggests that the cloud leaders are increasing their focus on imaging as a way to add, keep, and grow their healthcare cloud accounts.
The Takeaway
It’s not every day that a storage provider launches a solution specifically intended to cut their clients’ storage costs nearly in half, but this seems like a logical move for AWS, considering that storage costs and performance lag are two of cloud imaging’s biggest challenges. It makes even more sense considering imaging’s role in overall healthcare cloud adoption, where we are in the healthcare cloud landgrab, and the fact that Amazon’s core principals start with “Customer Obsessed.”
