AWS, Interoperability Institute Partner on Virtual Innovation Center

The Interoperability Institute (IOI), a non-profit formed by Michigan’s statewide health information exchange (HIE), has announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to launch Interop.WORLD, a virtual innovation center.

Interop.WORLD will allow participants to test new ideas, collaborate on challenges facing the health IT sector, and establish shared resources for the next generation’s health IT workforce.

“By leveraging the innovative spirit of IOI and AWS, we will accelerate the development and adoption of cutting-edge technologies addressing the most pressing healthcare challenges of our time,” Mary Kratz, executive vice president of IOI, said in a public statement. “We are excited to work with AWS to leverage expertise and cloud solutions to improve healthcare interoperability.”

Interop.WORLD will host virtual challenge events where participants use cloud technology to solve healthcare issues and accelerate innovation. The events will emphasize electronic consent processes, sharing of maternal health data, health equity, and training the next generation’s health IT workforce.

AWS, IOI, and other industry experts will assist the innovators with advice, collaboration, and building conceptual models through the virtual challenges.

For each IOI challenge, AWS will provide up to $125,000 in AWS credits to offset the use of AWS services in Interoperability Land, IOI’s cloud-hosted HL7 FHIR-based test bed.

Additional collaborators lending expertise for Interop.WORLD include:

• Interop.Community, a group of companies that have joined together for the advancement of interoperability through open platforms and open-source software
• Integrating the Health Enterprise USA (IHE-USA), powered by HIMSS, which establishes liaison relationships with various health IT stakeholders to achieve the goals of the national health IT agenda
• Velatura Health Information Exchange, a not-for-profit consolidation of HIEs, community-based organizations, and health information networks offering affiliation, collaboration, and integration opportunities to HIEs nationwide

“AWS has a comprehensive and deep set of cloud services, and we are proud to leverage these services to solve such a significant national challenge,” said Kim Majerus, AWS VP of Global Education, US State and Local Government. “Achieving data interoperability will enable data to be shared with, and leveraged by, patients and clinicians.”

“At the same time, it will help anonymize individual patient data to uphold privacy, so organizations meet high security and compliance standards,” Majerus added. “Practitioners will be able to combine a patient’s own data, at new levels of completeness and detail, with anonymized large-population patient data, including genomics. AI and machine learning models can use that large, detailed view to predict specific, individual health threats with unprecedented accuracy.”