AWS Helping to Unlock Potentially Life-saving Innovation for the Healthcare Sector – While Keeping Sensitive Information Locked Down

Marnie Wilking – CISO, VP Information Assurance, Orion Health

Many of the next significant, potentially lifesaving discoveries that will happen in healthcare will be the direct result of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Making the shift to big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) is something 42 percent of professionals believe will happen in the next three-to-five years. Despite these expectations, many are struggling to come to grips with how to leverage big data and the AI capabilities that come with it, Deloitte’s 2018 Global Human Capital Trends research recently found.

Alongside this transition – particularly in healthcare – is the need to wrap every aspect of the data journey and move to the cloud with deep, well thought-through security plans, because the most important innovations don’t just speed up our business opportunities – they protect them too.

Orion Health is the trusted custodian to nearly 65 million patient records, worldwide. It’s a delicate and highly sensitive operation that requires deep layers of security to ensure patient data only lands in the hands of those who are allowed to have it.

Migrating our platform onto AWS was no small undertaking. From moving highly sensitive information to maintaining uptime and customer access – it was the equivalent of changing the engines on a flying plane full of passengers.

Part of the project’s success has been opening up our team of 400+ developers from their previously siloed operations to work more collaboratively. This has enabled us to implement an information assurance by design culture in the way we build and deploy product. We can now, as a team, continuously identify ways to leverage automation opportunities for privacy and patient safety.

With security baked into every aspect of the platform, we are now able to provide our customers with a consistent, repeatable security model that can actively identify strange login behaviors or block unusual data usage or activity and notify our team of experts directly.

The healthcare sector’s shift to the cloud remains a slow process – not only because they’re concerned about compliance and security, but because it’s a complex environment to migrate. But once they take the big step, they’re able to be part of a more secure data journey that moves them toward precision medicine. A discipline that leverages data analytics and machine learning modules to predict diseases, assist diagnosis or help patients avoid hospital admissions altogether.

While at AWS re:Invent this week make sure to drop in Wednesday, November 28, at 5:30 p.m. at the Venetian, Level 4, Lando 4202. (SEC308-S – Orion Health CISO & Ops Unite for a Secure DevOps Practice)

Marnie Wilking is Orion Health’s Chief Information Security Officer based in Scottsdale, Arizona. She came from a twenty-year career in IT security in financial services. She has been responsible for establishing a mature security program for healthcare information technology solutions, setting up a security operations center, implementing automated delivery of Orion Health’s smart suite of SaaS applications, and qualifying for HITRUST certification.

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