A Tour of Philips HealthSuite Platform Powered by AWS

Every AWS customer needs secure identity and access management. HealthSuite Platform extends those capabilities beyond standard AWS services to provide its customers with security designed for the higher standard required of healthcare organizations. The HealthSuite Information Security Management System, for example, includes privacy and security controls that fulfill US HIPAA regulations, and it offers extensive compliance certifications including ISO 27001/18, SOC 2, and HITRUST.

The first category of HealthSuite Platform services that many users encounter is HealthSuite Host, which offers services for hosting both legacy and new cloud-native applications and for continuously monitoring their performance and health. “HealthSuite Host is a mixture of services we've built, access to third-party databases, and service brokers from AWS,” says Wiggins. “Using Host, customers can access AWS services with baked-in controls and capabilities specific to the healthcare space, running on our regulatory-compliant infrastructure.”

Using HealthSuite Authorize, Philips customers and partners can use access identity, access management, authorization, and consent services designed specifically for the healthcare space. “HealthSuite Authorize takes into account issues like the consent framework required for healthcare, identity federation needs within a health system, and the many data needs across healthcare roles,” says Wiggins.

Philips customers use HealthSuite Connect for highly secure, scalable IoT services they can use to manage, monitor, update, and collect data from smart devices. “For HealthSuite Connect, we started with multiple AWS IoT Core features such as Device Gateway and Rules Engine as well as AWS IoT Core policies, and we adapted them to be an even stronger fit for healthcare environments,” says Wiggins. “HealthSuite Connect enables our customers to identify, communicate with, upgrade, and monitor clinical-grade devices and consumer wellness devices. We also offer cloud-to-cloud integrations with a variety of providers to save developers the work of having to build these integrations themselves.”

Health systems and their partners can take advantage of HealthSuite Store to manage and archive consumer and clinical data from disparate sources in the platform's encrypted, cloud-hosted Clinical Data Repository, Telemetry Data Repository, and Object Storage Repository. “HealthSuite Store solves data problems that are unique to healthcare organizations, such as access restrictions, retention duration, and specific data formats,” says Wiggins. “We've evolved our databases over four years to be able to model all the types of healthcare-specific data, ranging from continuous data from devices to DICOM medical imaging information.”

The data repositories provide Philips customers with off-the-shelf simplicity similar to the AWS offerings they're built on, including Amazon S3, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Redshift. “We've built preconfigured databases and APIs around healthcare standards and requirements,” says Ad Dijkhoff, head of HealthSuite Platform business development at Philips. “Just like with deploying an AWS-based database, in just a few clicks customers have a database suitable for healthcare data, with controlled access, consent management, and all the other needed guardrails built right in.”

Philips teams and customers can turn to HealthSuite Share for standards-based interoperability between apps, devices, and third-party systems using FHIR, HL7, and IHE profiles. “After organizations have their data in the cloud, they'll start thinking about sharing it,” says Wiggins. “A key Share capability is IO Bridge, which simplifies mapping, ingesting, and transforming data so it can be exchanged within enterprise systems. It's very straightforward to work with because it has a flexible API-based framework.”

HealthSuite Analyze provides a big data processing framework for ingesting, managing, and analyzing healthcare data. Wiggins says, “Our platform can ingest very large volumes of data and house it in either a Hadoop-based data lake or one that is designed for smaller volumes of data and for structured data that doesn't necessitate the overhead of a Hadoop-based system. The Analyze Insights service supports the development and testing of algorithms, such as for clinical trials.”

The combination of AWS and HealthSuite Platform provides the capabilities to bring innovative healthcare solutions to market faster than ever. Wiggins concludes, “By running Philips HealthSuite Platform on AWS, we're able to provide our customers with the power, security, and flexibility of AWS services with the healthcare-specific added value we've built on top.”

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/health.