The Healthcare Value Proposition For AWS’s New Data Exchange

By Allison Proffitt 

January 15, 2020 | In November, Amazon Web Services announced AWS Data Exchange, a service that makes it easy for millions of AWS customers to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. 

“We all want to make data-driven decisions much easier,” said Stephen Orban, General Manager, AWS Data Exchange when discussing the platform at Amazon’s re:Invent event in December. “And customers have told us that they want the experience of finding and using data in the cloud—where more and more of it is actually being generated and stored—as easy as it is to shop for goods online today.”  

Part of the challenge in a data marketplace is the hurdles data providers must jump to make data available to would-be customers. AWS believes Data Exchange will facilitate that.  

“Despite the fact that more and more organizations are generating so much interesting and valuable data in the cloud, there hasn’t been an easy way to let the world know that they have it available, nor a way for them to easily deliver that and license it to customers at scale, even if they wanted to,” Orban said at re:Invent. “All of the plumbing that data providers need to serve their customers: storing the data, delivering it through… various channels…billing for it, and understanding how customers acquire the data so they can keep up with it, isn’t really a competitive differentiator. It’s the cost of doing business. And many providers have asked us for a much more efficient way to be able to deliver to their customers at scale.”  

AWS Data Exchange is by no means limited to life sciences. Among the more than 1,000 data products currently listed on AWS Data Exchange are offerings from Reuters, Foursquare, TransUnion, Change Healthcare, Virtusa, Pitney Bowes, TP ICAP, Vortexa, IMDb, Epsilon, Enigma, TruFactor, ADP, Dun & Bradstreet, Compagnie Financière Tradition, Verisk, Crux Informatics, TSX Inc., Acxiom, Rearc, and many more. 

But joining Orban on stage at re:Invent was Brett Davis, general manager of ConvergeHEALTH by Deloitte. Deloitte has integrated some of its services—most notably the ConvergeHEALTH Miner product—with AWS Data Exchange to create an efficient, robust, and secure health care data ecosystem, customizing and supplementing the “plumbing” that AWS Data Exchange is offering for health care data specifically.  

AWS Data Exchange is a data marketplace with tools both providers and subscribers need for easy data transfer, Davis explains to Bio-IT World. For data providers—big or small—AWS Data Exchange removes the need to build and maintain infrastructure for data storage, delivery, billing, and entitling. “AWS is creating pipes—very differentiated and secure pipes!—to enable the ecosystem to come together differently,” Davis says.   

AWS isn’t using or mining the data. Data providers sign publishing agreements with AWS attesting that their data are legal and de-identified. AWS does some tracking that illegal data aren’t being sold, but the “onus of the ethical burden on the use of the data is between the party who is generating the data and their collaborators on the other side,” Davis said.   

The data then generally go into a Data Exchange S3 bucket, particularly easy for companies already storing data on S3. Data providers describe the dataset, its price, how it can and can’t be used, and any other restrictions, and list the dataset for subscription. Once a dataset has been provisioned, data subscribers can use the AWS Data Exchange API to load data directly into Amazon S3 and then analyze it with a wide variety of AWS analytics and machine learning services.  

AWS Data Exchange offers version control as datasets change, easing work for data providers who may have many subscribers. When a dataset is updated, current subscribers are immediately notified through CloudWatch, and can see changes and pull down updates they want. “They’ve gotten rid of the complexity on the supplier side,” Davis says. The old versions of datasets are still available for reanalysis. “A lot of the challenges of the one-to-many relationship when it comes to moving data around are addressed.”  

Data providers have a fair amount of control over who subscribes to a dataset, he says. AWS Data Exchange’s Subscription Verification service lets data providers specify the types of subscribers who can access the data. For instance, a nutrition app startup could list de-identified nutrition data, but specify only collaborators creating predictive models for cardiovascular readmissions. If a pharma company, for example, expresses interest in the dataset, AWS Data Exchange facilitates an open line of communication between the two companies. If the collaboration is mutually agreeable, the subscriber company can provision the data through Data Exchange.  

“On the surface this might seem like it’s creating a wild, wild west of selling data everywhere, but in fact it’s just the opposite,” Davis insists. “It’s actually creating more transparency, more control, and more security than what we have today.”  

The Omniscient Miner 

While the process is straightforward, ConvergeHEALTH’s suite of integrated services offers solutions specifically to fill holes for health data, and to bring the exchange into a familiar environment for existing Deloitte customers.  

For data suppliers, ConvergeHEALTH now offers Data Supplier Readiness, a consulting service to help any organization think through the business model of data provisioning, accessing Deloitte’s history working with real-world data and real-world evidence, and then prepare appropriate datasets for listing. “We can help them make sure the datasets are de-identified and structured in a way that makes it useful in the Exchange,” Davis explains “That’s a one-time set of expertise that we can bring to the table.”  

For more long-term use, Deloitte has integrated its ConvergeHEALTH Miner product with AWS Data Exchange. ConvergeHEALTH Miner empowers users to search across their own data lakes—all the data within an organization—for very specific criteria. Now Miner has been connected with the AWS APIs. Miner users can search not only their own data within the company, but Miner will also pull available datasets from Data Exchange that may meet search requirements. Without leaving ConvergeHEALTH Miner, researchers can request to purchase those datasets, and the workflow goes to the company’s procurement processes, is routed through a governance process, and—if approved—the data are made available within Miner.  

The advantage is more than just process efficiencies, though Davis says that finding datasets, negotiating contracts, and ingesting the new data could have taken weeks or months before, and can now happen in minutes—or as quickly as your procurement approval process. More importantly, he emphasizes, is that linking Miner with Data Exchange delivers relevant and available data that researchers or business executives didn’t know was there.   

“That combination of CovergeHEALTH Miner with AWS Data Exchange now allows an organization to not only know what data they have within their own organization… [but] provide visibility into what other datasets exist out there, outside your organization that may enhance your research question or enhance the business or clinical question you’re trying to answer.”  

Who is Selling? 

The value of the marketplace depends on more than just the quality of the pipes and ease of use. The quality, quantity, and variety of the data available are key. Currently there’s no star or retail-style review system for datasets available on the Data Exchange, but Davis expects mechanisms to rank data quality to evolve with market use.  

He also expects the variety of available datasets and types to expand. For small companies already storing data in S3 and without the infrastructure to otherwise manage data provisioning, the value proposition is easy to see, but Davis believes there’s a “significant advantage” for even the well-established data brokers to participate. Even if brokers don’t list their datasets on the public exchange (thus revealing prices), they can still make use of the Data Exchange “behind the scenes plumbing”, Davis said, to deliver data efficiently to their customers, manage updates, etc.  

He also believes the Data Exchange will connect them with new customers and new markets if they embrace it. “I would argue that there’s a long tail of potential clients outside the large ones that they could use this as a mechanism to more efficiently reach than with a sales force.”  

But no matter how enthusiastically the Data Exchange is embraced (or not) by existing data brokers, Davis believes that life sciences still has big data gaps, and the Data Exchange can help fill those by bringing in newer, smaller data sources with content of value.  

“For some of the most high impact questions that face us today from a healthcare perspective—whether that’s healthcare quality questions, healthcare cost and health economic questions, or new research questions into what is happening out there in the real world—a lot of the companies that are generating that data [are digital startups],” Davis believes. Those are the companies, he says, that have access to critical insights into what’s happening for patients and healthcare outside of the four walls of a clinic. “I think AWS Data Exchange will make bringing those companies online to ethically and securely participate in a new data healthcare ecosystem much, much more efficient.”