In the massive healthcare cloud services arena, Amazon Web Services has arrived. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure were waiting for the e-commerce behemoth to join.
Healthcare is typically a slow mover in technology adoption when compared to other industries. AWS's work in the education field, for example, with AWS Educate, launched in 2015.
Last week, AWS for Health was unveiled, albeit the cloud services platform is being used by "thousands of healthcare and life sciences customers globally," already. Moderna is likely the most high-profile, having used various AWS services to support its drug development, including a COVID-19 vaccine.
Last April, Google Cloud opened its healthcare application programming interface to the public a few years after its initial unveiling.
More recently, Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare became generally available in October through Azure APIs for healthcare interoperability.
RELATED: Google opens Cloud Healthcare API to health systems to support data exchange
AWS is billing its healthcare play as a set of curated services and a partner network to decrease the cost of care, enhance collaboration, speed up drug development and improve data and operational decisions in the clinic.
Internal resourcing and expertise are barriers to assessing and building in-house solutions, Patrick Combes, AWS worldwide healthcare and life sciences technical strategy lead, said in a blog post detailing the new initiative.
"As a highly regulated and complex industry, various global compliance requirements can further complicate healthcare and life science organizations’ moves to implement digital initiatives," Combes wrote.
AWS partners across healthcare and life sciences include GE Healthcare, Philips, Cerner, 3M, Deloitte, Accenture, NVIDIA, Roche and others in biopharma, genomics, medical research and clinical information systems.
Science informatics software and services company Dotmatics is one player taking part in the program. Dotmatics is working on automating lab data workflows for R&D by ramping up data access, analysis and exchange among scientists.
"An accessible and secure data foundation is key to improving innovation through better-informed decision-making for scientists, aided by next generation AI and machine learning," said Alastair Hill, co-founder and chief information officer of Dotmatics, in a statement.