Big Tech player dives deep into medical imaging with ‘purpose-built’ service
The world’s most popular supplier of cloud services has become a dedicated radiology vendor.
Amazon Web Services announced the move last week, saying its offering—AWS HealthImaging—can help developers of cloud-native applications store, analyze and share medical imaging data at petabyte scale.
The company says healthcare providers can send data from imaging equipment straight to AWS HealthImaging for subsequent retrievals by radiologists working in PACS or other reading applications.
The announcement came as a blog post written by Tehsin Syed, general manager of Health AI, and Andy Schuetz, PhD, a principal product manager in the same division.
Among AWS’s product claims are low storage costs for image archives, thanks primarily to the infrastructure-obviating nature of the cloud, and simplified data migration from the edge to the cloud via AWS’s own gateways or those built by AWS partners.
The post names Philips as one such partner, saying the imaging giant plans to use AWS HealthImaging as a foundational element of their next-generation medical imaging suite.
The post quotes Philips’s chief innovation and strategy officer, Shez Partovi.
“Our cloud-enabled HealthSuite Imaging PACS intends to use AWS HealthImaging to improve experiences and accessibility for clinicians all over the world,” Partovi says.
Also already aboard are the Nvidia-founded medical AI framework Monai, the medical informatics company Dicomatics and, in the academic medical sphere, Wake Forest Baptist Health.
Syed and Schuetz state the move to concentrate on the medical imaging industry is a response to demand from healthcare providers and medical researchers.
“Both of these customer groups express a desire to have all their organization’s medical imaging applications work from the same store of data,” they write. “The cloud can help address these customer needs. With [AWS] HealthImaging, builders, like AWS Partners who provide medical imaging applications and research solutions, can focus more on tackling these customers’ challenges instead of worrying about infrastructure.”
AWS says it won’t charge for importing data to AWS HealthImaging, as pixel data encoding and metadata normalization are performed automatically.
Going by revenue and market share, Amazon Web Services is the biggest cloud provider globally, ahead of runners-up Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.