Data Pools Get Deeper as AWS, Truveta Help Health Care Mine Insights

Buried deep within immense volumes of health care data are clinical insights waiting to be unearthed to improve treatments, cure diseases and better serve communities. Now the race is on to scale data from across many organizations to achieve this goal and to make it easier to search and analyze.

Of course, no one is certain precisely what this transformation will look like nor how significant the generated results may be, but activity has been heating up in this sector.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently made its cloud-based health care data lake, AWS HealthLake, available to customers. The solution enables providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies to securely store, transform, query and analyze health data at scale in a single repository.

The solution offers a series of connectors that automatically import records from widely used health care applications. Once the data are gathered, algorithms, based on natural language processing, organize the data and make it easier to use, AWS states.

Amazon HealthLake also makes it possible to move the combined patient data to other systems for further processing. For this purpose, the data are stored in the industry-standard FHIR (fast healthcare operability resources). The moving process takes place with a separate application programming device that AWS provides in its Amazon product.

Truveta Gets a Boost

Eleswhere, Truveta, the Seattle-based for-profit company launched in February, is rapidly taking shape. It aims to analyze de-identified health data to improve clinical decision-making and help researchers find cures faster.

Truveta received a financial boost recently when it closed a $95 million Series A funding round and expanded the number of its health system owners from 14 to 17 with the addition of Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health, MedStar Health (Columbia, Md.) and Texas Health Resources in Arlington.

Truveta, which means truth plus knowledge, and its members represent more than 15% of all care delivered in the U.S. The company plans to use the $95 million to recruit more staff and build the infrastructure and cloud computing resources needed to support clinical data.

The new partners will add to the diversity of Truveta’s dataset, bringing in greater Black and Hispanic populations, which will help generate findings that represent a broader sampling across the country.

These deeper and more diverse data sets will help not only provider organizations, but also Truveta’s biotech, pharmacy and research customers, answer such key questions as which treatments are more effective, which population groups are most at risk and why.