All-in on AWS, Geneia Innovates to Help Customers Improve Patient Outcomes

Imagine, as a physician, being able to predict when a patient might have a cardiac event. Then, picture intervening with a care plan that could possibly prevent that event. That's the world Geneia LLC imagined and is now bringing to life. Geneia is an analytic solutions and services company in the healthcare sector. From data collected and analyzed via its Theon Platform, it helps customers improve patient outcomes and lower costs, with the goal of restoring the joy of healing to the medical practice. Through its platform, Geneia extracts data points on millions of patients. Using that data, it refines standards of patient care and identifies patients who might need care interventions.

Geneia’s cloud journey is integral to its success. Three years ago, Geneia went all-in on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “We treat technology as an auxiliary aid to clinicians. It should always strengthen the link between the clinician and the patient—never get in the way,” says Fred Rahmanian, the chief analytics and technology officer for Geneia. The tech that supports the company’s Theon Platform is AWS Cloud–based. “Everything we do is on AWS, and we take advantage of AWS features and products anywhere we can,” says Rahmanian.

Geneia was drawn to AWS because it offered HIPAA-eligible services and was willing to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA). A BAA is part of HIPAA regulations and ensures that vendors safeguard protected health information (PHI). “When we set out to move to the cloud, our goal was to create a HIPAA-enabled environment that put patient privacy front and center,” says Rahmanian. “Because of our focus on patient privacy, it was imperative for us and our customers to choose a vendor willing to sign a BAA. AWS did that for us, and that remains one of the key advantages we get from our association with AWS.”

“Geneia needed to be HIPAA-compliant while still remaining innovative, fast-moving, and agile,” says Rahmanian. “We could not allow privacy mechanisms to slow our progress. That’s what AWS products let us do: stay secure yet nimble as a company.”

Privacy and security are built into AWS products. Geneia employees use Amazon WorkSpaces, a managed, highly secure cloud desktop service that they can access from any supported device of their choice. “By using Amazon WorkSpaces, we have no data leakage, no PHI on individual laptops, and no copying or downloading of files and data,” says Rahmanian. Amazon WorkSpaces also frees the company from the need to distribute or track physical assets, maintain infrastructure to support those assets, or worry about data loss or theft.

Security is a top concern, as is price predictability. Geneia uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and help protect its customers’ data. Amazon S3 provides Geneia with price-competitive and price-predictable storage and can scale to meet the needs of customers of any size. “Pricing for Amazon S3 is clear. I know exactly how much it will cost,” says Rahmanian. “Because Amazon S3 is scalable, we can take full advantage of the elasticity of cloud. I know it will serve anyone from our smallest customer, with a few gigabytes of data, to our largest customer, with petabytes of data. I also know exactly what the costs will be, and so do our customers.” Geneia uses that price predictability to calculate the cost when onboarding new customers and prices its products accordingly.

Geneia’s Theon Platform runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide secure, scalable compute capacity in the cloud. Geneia uses Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances for cost savings on its primary workloads. The company also relies on Amazon EC2 to enable quick experimentation with proof-of-concept (POC) exercises. “With Amazon EC2, we can provision instances in seconds, which we do when running POCs with new vendors or projects. When finished, we shut down the instances, paying only for what we used. This allows us to identify and use new technologies much faster than we used to. That’s a major advantage of being on the AWS Cloud,” says Rahmanian.

The quick spin-up of Amazon EC2 instances and the breadth of AWS products allow Geneia to continuously innovate with its product offerings. That’s true for its POCs as well as its Data Intelligence Lab. Data scientists at the lab test new ways to apply AI, machine learning, deep learning, and other data-science tools to reduce healthcare costs and improve patient care. The lab creates predictive models that help Geneia’s health plan, hospital, and physician customers identify and then engage with patients at risk for complications resulting from their medical condition. Successful models refine the Theon Platform, helping customers continuously improve patient care and outcomes.

Geneia’s technology future is focused on five key themes and the role AWS will play. Those key areas are: scalability, to seamlessly add more customers and data; automation, to lower total cost of ownership; expansion of AI and machine learning, to provide customers with better insights; operational efficiency, to streamline operations with automation and container use; and data governance, to remain focused on data privacy and security as the customer base and data collection grow.

Rahmanian concludes, “We are confident we can accomplish our future goals using AWS technology. In fact, we know we can. For every theme we’ve outlined, we've identified one or more technologies that we want to use or evaluate in AWS.”

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