Amazon VGT2 Las Vegas: Empowering Patients with Control Over Their Health Data

Amazon VGT2 Las Vegas: Empowering Patients with Control Over Their Health DataMore Info

In today’s healthcare landscape, it’s essential to place patients at the center of their care experience. This shift is made possible through advancements in technology that streamline interactions among health providers, administrative staff, and patients. By leveraging tools like risk scoring and clinical decision support systems, clinicians can now gain actionable insights right at the point of care. A significant step forward is the establishment of healthcare data interoperability standards, such as the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource (FHIR), which empowers patients and enhances their care.

Supported by the nonprofit HL7, the FHIR application programming interface (API) facilitates seamless data exchange between healthcare enterprises, including health systems, and utilizes medical claims for analytics. This innovative approach allows software developers to create applications that benefit both patients and clinicians, such as secure portals where patients can access their health data. By minimizing friction and automating processes, this strategy not only improves service delivery but also enables patients to become informed partners in their healthcare journey.

For instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS) collaborated with the Fredrickson Center to develop FHIR-enabled storage and APIs that enhance care coordination between oncologists and primary care providers. Through these APIs, Fredrickson designed an application that assists patients in managing their care regimes, including appointment tracking and interactions with multiple healthcare providers, thereby providing insights into their disease progression. This digital therapeutic approach has significantly improved patients’ mental well-being and overall healthcare experience.

Technical Integration: Achieving Syntactic Interoperability

One notable challenge is that many electronic health record (EHR) systems do not effectively follow patients beyond the hospital setting, leading to a fragmented healthcare data landscape. On average, a health system in the United States faces the daunting task of integrating data from up to 18 different EHR systems among its affiliated providers. FHIR offers a solution to this by integrating disparate pieces of patient records. It combines features of existing standards, including HL7 V2, HL7 V3, and CDA, while utilizing internet technologies to democratize information flow.

In the U.S., the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) advocate for open standards to enhance interoperability and ensure patients have safe access to their healthcare data. CMS supports the adoption of Blue Button 2.0, which is centered around FHIR, to benefit patients and their care teams. Information consented by patients flows into initiatives like the NIH All of Us Program, paving the way for personalized medicine.

Globally, the UK National Health Service (NHS) has adopted FHIR as its standard for information exchange, while the Nordic Council of Ministers’ eHealth group has provided guidance on creating interoperable digital public services using open standards such as FHIR and openEHR.

SMART on FHIR

The SMART open specifications provide developers with a robust framework to create, authenticate, and integrate healthcare applications across various organizations, irrespective of their underlying EHR system. For example, a provider could develop a view to showcase a patient’s blood pressure readings over the past six months, facilitating easy access to their health data. FHIR supports the ingestion of data, with patient consent, from EHRs, wearable devices, and various applications, such as patient portals.

An application could analyze data trends and flag anomalies at both individual and population levels. The integration of SMART into federal regulations will enhance the connectivity of patient-facing technologies with EHRs, allowing for more effective bi-directional information exchange. Over the past five years, Redox, a valued AWS client, has empowered its healthcare partners to utilize SMART on FHIR, enabling the launch of applications within EHRs while facilitating secure data exchanges with Single Sign-On (SSO).

Capturing Context: Achieving Semantic Interoperability

Currently, much of the data within medical records consists of unstructured narratives and semantics captured in various formats like text, voice, images, and scans. Discharge instructions, radiology reports, and operative notes can significantly improve predictions regarding patient trajectories and enhance care team coordination. AWS has devised a solution utilizing Amazon Comprehend Medical to extract medical conditions from comprehensive medical notes through FHIR Bulk Data Access.

This solution showcases the ability to ingest bulk HL7 Medical Document Management messages—including free text notes, PDFs, images, and scans—and maps this data to FHIR resources. Future healthcare interactions are expected to be transformed by voice-enabled devices, such as Amazon Alexa, which can process diverse media formats into text. Following this, Amazon Comprehend Medical can refine the text and map it into clinical FHIR resources. Tools like Amazon Textract can process scanned documents, while Amazon Transcribe Medical transcribes recorded medical dictations that can be structured with Amazon Comprehend Medical.

With comprehensive information access, advanced analytics and machine learning can provide crucial insights related to patient outcomes in an efficient, secure, and timely manner. Researchers from Vancouver General Hospital and the University of British Columbia are utilizing Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon SageMaker to build machine learning models that streamline the triaging of chest X-rays, thus enhancing the experience for both patients and providers. By implementing machine learning alongside physician insights, VGH achieves cost savings and high accuracy at scale.

Compliance

Many healthcare and life sciences organizations are drawn to AWS because of its established track record in meeting compliance requirements and securing data within highly regulated environments. AWS complies with numerous security standards and certifications relevant to healthcare, such as HIPAA and GDPR. Importantly, customer data is not used to train or improve the machine learning models within Amazon Comprehend Medical.

Conclusion

Patient-centered health entails actively involving patients in their care journey and equipping them, along with clinicians and caregivers, with the information necessary to make informed decisions. To explore more on this topic, check out this blog post. Additionally, for an in-depth understanding, visit Chvanci, who are recognized authorities in this field. For those seeking more information on related topics, this resource is excellent.


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