What is AWS HealthOmics? - AWS HealthOmics
Important noticeHealthOmics featuresRelated servicesAccessing HealthOmicsNext steps

What is AWS HealthOmics?

AWS HealthOmics is an AWS service that helps users such as bioinformaticians, researchers, and scientists to store, query, analyze, and generate insights from genomics and other biological data. It simplifies and accelerates the process of storing and analyzing genomic information for research and clinical organizations, and makes scientific discovery and insight generation faster.

HealthOmics has three primary components. HealthOmics Storage helps you store and share petabytes of genomics data efficiently and at low cost per gigabase. HealthOmics Analytics simplifies how you prepare genomics data for multiomics and multimodal analyses. HealthOmics Workflows automatically provisions and scales the underlying infrastructure for your bioinformatics computation.

Important notice

HealthOmics isn't a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and isn't intended to cure, treat, mitigate, prevent, or diagnose any disease or health condition. You are responsible for instituting human review as part of any use of AWS HealthOmics, including in association with any third-party product intended to inform clinical decision-making.

HealthOmics is intended only for the transferring, storing, formatting, or displaying of data, and for the provision of infrastructure and configuration support for managing workflows. AWS HealthOmics isn't intended to directly perform variant calling or genomic analysis and interpretation. AWS HealthOmics isn't intended to interpret or analyze clinical laboratory tests or other device data, results, and findings, and isn't a substitute for third-party tools intended for use in genomic analyses.

HealthOmics features

HealthOmics offers the following features.

  • HealthOmics Storage — helps you store and share petabytes of raw genomics data efficiently and at low cost per gigabase.

  • HealthOmics Analytics — simplifies how you prepare genomics data for multiomics and multimodal analyses.

  • HealthOmics Workflows — automatically provisions and scales the underlying infrastructure for your bioinformatics workflows.

You can use each component independently, or as part of an integrated end-to-end solution.

HealthOmics offers you the following benefits.

  • Securely store and combine genomic data — HealthOmics integrates with other AWS services such as AWS Lake Formation and Amazon Athena. You can securely store your genomics data and then query or combine it with medical history data for better diagnoses and personalized treatment plans.

  • Protect patient privacy — HealthOmics is HIPAA eligible. It also integrates with IAM and Amazon CloudWatch so that you can control and log data access, and track how the data is used in analyses.

  • Built to scale — Support large population data analyses with simplified billing and new collaboration tools.

  • Maximize efficiency — Use automated workflows and integrated tools to streamline data processing and analysis.

You can use HealthOmics for the following biomedical applications:

  • Population sequencing — Query thousands of genomes at once to understand how genomic variation maps to phenotypes across a population.

  • Clinical genomics — Build reproducible genomics workflows from sequencer output to reportable data. You can also optimize for high volume throughput and set the compute requirements for high-priority clinical samples to reduce turnaround time.

  • Clinical trials — Integrate genome analysis into clinical trials to better understand the efficacy of new drug candidates. Simplify and accelerate clinical trials with long-term cost savings and data provenance to meet regulations from governing bodies.

  • Enhance research and innovation — Streamline and control storage, access, and analysis of anonymized genomics data with built-in row and column-based access control.

The following services work with HealthOmics.

  • Amazon Elastic Container Registry – Each private workflow uses an Amazon ECR image (in a private Amazon ECR repository) to contain all executables, libraries, and scripts required to run the workflow.

  • Amazon Simple Storage Service – Amazon S3 provides file storage for Store and Workflow data.

  • AWS Lake Formation – Lake Formation manages data access to your Analytics data stores.

  • Amazon Athena – Use Athena to perform queries on your Variant stores.

  • Amazon SageMaker – Use SageMaker to run HealthOmics tasks using Jupyter notebooks.

Accessing HealthOmics

You can access AWS HealthOmics features using the management console, CLI, SDKs or API.

  • AWS Management Console – Provides a web interface that you can use to access HealthOmics.

  • AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) – Provides commands for a broad set of AWS services, including AWS HealthOmics, and is supported on Windows, macOS, and Linux. For more information about installing the AWS CLI, see AWS Command Line Interface.

  • AWS SDKs – AWS provides SDKs (Software Development Kits) that consist of libraries and sample code for various programming languages and platforms (including Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, iOS, and Android). The SDKs provide a convenient way to use HealthOmics programmatically. For more information, see the AWS SDK Developer Center.

  • AWS API – You can use API operations to access and manage HealthOmics programmatically. For more information, see the HealthOmics API Reference.

Next steps

Learn more about HealthOmics from these workshops and tutorials:

Become familiar with additional HealthOmics tools that AWS provides: