Amazon to tag health records to spot threats in patient populations

5 min readDec 9, 2020

When it comes to corralling the next virus with the potential to spring an epidemic, who do you trust more — the federal agency coordinating the delivery of vaccines in the coming weeks, or the company shipping that box with the smile logo destined for your doorstep?

With the United States on the threshold of approving the first vaccines to fight COVID-19, Amazon announced a new “data lake” service that would tag information in everything from lab reports and insurance claims to doctor’s notes and medical records, with the goal of making it easier for the health sector to spot trends and anomalies in their patient populations. The data would not be aggregated, however, to determine wider trends in the population.

Amazon Web Services states its new service would comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which has been in place for a quarter century, providing one level of defense to prevent a patient’s medical profile from being released to others beyond those providing individual care or paying for it.

Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention reported findings that U.S. residents were already afflicted with coronavirus weeks in advance of the World Health Organization reporting the outbreak in Wuhan, China, based on blood tests that showed some patients having developed antibodies as of early December 2019. CDC reported the Wuhan outbreak to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Jan. 3, with CDC assembling a team four days later to track it.

Amazon HealthLake is designed to take tagged information in individual patient records and index it for advanced analysis by hospitals and pharmacies, clinical trial sites and health insurers among others. The information would be tagged according to the existing Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard that is overseen by the Health Level Seven International nonprofit based in Ann Arbor, Mich.

AWS is allowing entities to apply for free access to a “preview” version of Amazon HealthLake, in advance of general availability that will charge 27 cents for every hour a user spends in a “data store” analyzing information, along with 25 cents monthly for every gigabyte of data stored in the system beyond a free allowance of 10 gigabytes. The company provides projections for two scenarios of hospital use of Amazon HealthLake that could result in annual costs of anywhere from $2,500 to $6,000 using the services.

In addition to tracking the progression of diseases, Amazon says the system can be used to determine whether health insurance underwriters are charging the right premiums for the policies they issue.

AWS already links into myriad end points in the health industry, spanning data aggregators like Danbury-based IQvia; hospital systems like Hartford Healthcare; insurers like Anthem; pharmaceutical developers like Pfizer; and makers of medical systems like GE Healthcare.

Amazon has been pushing hard into the health sector the past few years, including Haven Healthcare under development with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase; Amazon Pharmacy which launched last month; and an Amazon Care app for people to get health advice on whether they should see a physician, with the app scheduling in-person appointments in the Seattle area where the company is based.

Amazon to tag health records to spot threats in patient populations

Written by Frod Da