With technological advancements in imaging and the availability of new efficient computational tools, digital pathology has taken center stage in both research and diagnostic settings. Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) has been at the center of this transformation, enabling us to rapidly digitize pathology slides into high resolution images. By making slides instantly shareable and analyzable, WSI has already improved reproducibility and enabled enhanced education and remote pathology services. Today, digitization of entire slides at very high resolution can occur inexpensively in less than a minute. As a result, more and more healthcare and life sciences organizations have acquired massive catalogues of digitized slides.

One of the most significant challenges to the advancement of precision medicine has been the lack of an infrastructure to support translational bioinformatics, supporting organizations as they work to uncover unique datasets to find novel associations and signals. By supporting greater interoperability and collaboration, data scientists, developers, clinicians and pharmaceutical partners have the opportunity to leverage machine learning to reduce the time it takes to move from insight to discovery, ultimately leading to the right patients receiving the right care, with the right therapeutic at the right time. To get a better understanding of challenges surrounding precision medicine and its future, Healthcare IT News sat down with Taha Kass-Hout, director of machine learning at AWS. Q: You've said that one of the most significant challenges to the advancement of precision medicine has been the lack of an infrastructure to support translational bioinformatics. Please explain this challenge in detail. A: One of the challenges in developing and utilizing storage, analytics and interpretive methods is the sheer volume of biomedical data that needs to be transformed that often resides on multiple systems and in multiple formats.

As the digital revolution transforms the fields of healthcare and life sciences, organizations and individuals stand to gain from new trends that use data in innovative ways to provide better patient outcomes. To leverage these developments, organizations need to embrace a cloud data platform as part of their digital transformation. All four of the following trends require the flexibility, security, and accessibility of the cloud to achieve their full potential. The advent of mobile health data applications, or mHealth, has given patients on-demand access to their health information. Through these apps, patients can view their medical records, communicate with their care team, and manage appointments and billing 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Centralized electronic health record (EHR) systems have enabled self-service patient data management, empowering individuals to better track information about their health.