AWS for Industries
AWS HealthLake Launches in Canada: Healthcare Data Innovation with FHIR
At Amazon Web Services (AWS) we’re excited to announce the expansion of AWS HealthLake to the Canada (Central) Region, marking a significant milestone in our commitment to supporting healthcare organizations across Canada.
This expansion enables the storage and transformation of health data using Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resources (FHIR) standards, while maintaining data residency within Canada, for:
- Canadian healthcare providers
- Provincial health authorities
- Health technology companies
- Health benefits providers
- Life Sciences organizations
Customers and partners, like Kainos and Greenway Health®, are building interoperable solutions using AWS HealthLake to help improve healthcare services and patient care. Following the successful launches in the European Union (EU), and Asia-Pacific Regions, AWS HealthLake now brings the same purpose-built capabilities to Canadian healthcare and life sciences customers. It is helping keep their multi-modal health data standardized, accessible, and secure.
What is AWS HealthLake?
AWS HealthLake is a fully managed, ISO and SOC-certified, PIPEDA-eligible service that helps healthcare and life sciences organizations store and transform health data at petabyte scale. The service uses the HL7 FHIR R4 standard for healthcare data interoperability and includes built-in natural language processing capabilities to extract clinical context from unstructured medical text.
AWS HealthLake automatically standardizes data using common medical nomenclatures (for example, ICD10-cm, SNOMED CT, and RxNorm) and transforms it into analytics-ready formats. Organizations can build comprehensive patient profiles and AI-powered healthcare applications, without specialized data engineering expertise. The service provides secure, high-performance data access with sub-millisecond latency and supports seamless integration with third-party applications through SMART on FHIR capabilities.
Healthcare organizations across Canada can use AWS HealthLake to:
- Unify clinical data across multiple health systems into a normalized FHIR-based data model
- Implement provincial health information exchanges that improve care transitions
- Enhance electronic medical record (EMR) system data exchange capabilities
- Enable cross-jurisdiction healthcare partnerships through standardized FHIR-based patient data sharing
- Provide longitudinal patient data for AI-ready applications
- Support value-based care initiatives through real-time data access
- Develop comprehensive patient profiles for enhanced population health management
- Build data exchange platforms
How customers and Partners use AWS HealthLake
AWS customers and Partners are delivering transformative healthcare solutions globally using AWS HealthLake. Kainos, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with Healthcare Competency, has demonstrated the power of FHIR-based implementations through their work with major public health organizations. Their experience shows how standardizing health data can transform care delivery through improved interoperability, enhanced analytics, and artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities.
“AWS HealthLake’s expansion to the Canada Central Region represents a significant opportunity for Canadian healthcare providers. Our global implementations have shown that organizations can leverage FHIR-based interoperability to unlock powerful capabilities in population health management, clinical analytics, and AI-driven insights, all while maintaining data within their jurisdiction. This combination of standardized data and advanced capabilities creates a foundation for continuous healthcare innovation,” states Daniel Kemp, Head of Healthcare, Kainos.
Greenway Health, which develops EHR solutions for ambulatory medical practices, has demonstrated the scalability and efficiency of AWS HealthLake through their successful migration. This implementation achieved remarkable results: 9.5 billion FHIR resources ingested with no errors during initial data load, and 638 clients seamlessly migrated to the cloud in less than one day. They are projecting a cost savings of $1.9 million in software and infrastructure through 2025. “From a healthcare standpoint, the use of AWS HealthLake is a huge step forward in interoperability and standardization,” says Philip Nick, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer, Greenway Health.
Committed to data sovereignty and compliance in Canada
The availability of AWS HealthLake in the Canada (Central) Region provides data sovereignty and compliance with Canadian federal and provincial data protection regulations. Canadian customers can maintain their healthcare data within Canadian borders, while benefiting from enterprise-grade cloud capabilities.
Contact an AWS representative to learn how we can help accelerate your AWS HealthLake use case and position your organization at the forefront of Canadian healthcare innovation.