Healthcare and life sciences organizations generate vast amounts of structured and unstructured health data from various systems, applications, and devices every hour. The secure exchange of this data, adhering to interoperability standards like Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), is essential for improved clinical decisions, enhanced clinical trials, and operational efficiency. To support this evolution, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) mandates that Electronic Health Records (EHRs) must make data available in the FHIR standard and comply with specific implementations. Moreover, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is increasingly dependent on these formats for its data-sharing requirements for both providers and payers.
However, fulfilling these requirements can be complex, as organizations often depend on intricate data exports and the implementation of challenging application programming interfaces (APIs). EHR vendors, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Systems Integrators (SIs), and IT teams collaborating with healthcare organizations face the daunting task of constructing, operating, and maintaining FHIR servers and APIs in line with changing regulatory obligations.
To alleviate these challenges, we are pleased to introduce three new features to Amazon HealthLake’s managed FHIR API offerings. These enhancements simplify the development of interoperability applications that comply with ONC and CMS interoperability and patient access rules.
- SMART on FHIR: Easily authorize users and third-party applications accessing FHIR data using OAuth 2.0.
- Patient Access API: Enhance patient and provider-facing applications.
- FHIR Bulk Data Access: Securely exchange health data among healthcare organizations via a bulk data access API.
Launched in 2021, Amazon HealthLake is a fully managed, HIPAA-eligible service that allows customers to securely store, transact, analyze, and exchange health data. Customers can aggregate data from various sources, including EHR systems, claims processing systems, lab management systems, devices, and even social determinants of health (SDoH) data into a unified interoperable format. Amazon HealthLake delivers transactional FHIR APIs for customers to access this data to create interactive applications and interoperability workflows. Through HealthLake Analytics, customers can extract insights from this data using SQL on FHIR, develop analytical dashboards for managing population health and quality measures, and train and deploy ML models for clinical decision support.
These capabilities support customers in adhering to ONC and CMS patient access rules related to interoperability while reducing the burden of maintaining FHIR APIs through a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which eliminates the need for upfront capital investment.
Customers can utilize HealthLake FHIR APIs to develop a range of interactive applications, including longitudinal medical record viewers that consolidate patient medical history across various data types like clinical, imaging, and genomic information. The SMART on FHIR framework also enables third-party developers to create applications on top of FHIR data securely.
With Amazon HealthLake, customers can maximize the value of their data. The HealthLake Analytics module automatically converts transactional data in FHIR format into a flattened columnar format within Apache Iceberg tables for analytics, saving time and effort in maintaining complex ETL pipelines. By leveraging AWS Analytics and AI/ML services (such as Amazon Athena and Amazon SageMaker), customers can explore use cases like SQL analytics on clinical data, population health assessments, and clinical decision support. They can also effortlessly train ML models on their data or make inferences from existing models for applications like disease prediction and risk stratification.
A notable example of organizations utilizing these new capabilities is MedSolutions, which has been providing a range of products and services to healthcare facilities for over three decades. Their mission focuses on improving patient care and operational efficiency through advanced clinical and financial solutions.
“We’re thrilled to use Amazon HealthLake FHIR APIs to advance our interoperability mission and assist our clients in meeting CMS regulations for interoperability and patient access. The managed service from Amazon HealthLake alleviates the need to develop and sustain the underlying FHIR APIs and infrastructure. This enables us to concentrate on swiftly innovating applications for our customers. We are also collaborating with AWS to explore innovative tools like Amazon Comprehend Medical and HealthLake Analytics,” stated Jordan Smith, Director of Technology at MedSolutions.
Similarly, leading EHR provider HealthTech Solutions is eager to utilize Amazon HealthLake to foster innovation across their offerings. “HealthTech Solutions is excited to use Amazon HealthLake to speed up the delivery of innovative solutions to our clients. The managed service allows us to allocate more R&D resources towards meaningful healthcare innovations. Integrated AWS capabilities, including Comprehend Medical and HealthLake Analytics, present new opportunities for us to create value for our clients,” said Laura Jones, Chief Technology Officer at HealthTech Solutions.
These improved features include SMART on FHIR authorization, Patient Access API, and FHIR Bulk Data Access API, which empower customers to share their data securely with authorized parties while ensuring compliance with the latest ONC and CMS regulatory standards, including HL7 FHIR API R4 v4.0.1 and FHIR Bulk Data Access v2.0.0. For further insights, check out this informative blog post here.
The SMART on FHIR framework offers dependable and secure authorization for applications using the OAuth 2.0 standard. Customers and partners developing SMART on FHIR applications can manage data access and implement fine-grained access controls to ensure that only authorized users can access resources. ISVs can cultivate a community of third-party developers to create clinical applications that enhance user experience while maintaining robust security. App developers can innovate and provide timely information to users, such as alerting clinicians when patient lab results are ready, thus improving care.
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