This article is the second part of our AWS Health Services series, where we explore cloud-native tools designed to transform healthcare infrastructure and operations. If you haven’t read the first part yet, make sure to check it out: What is AWS HealthLake? In that article, we explained how HealthLake helps healthcare providers unify and analyze structured clinical data at scale.
Now we are moving forward with the second installment in this series.
This time, we’re focusing on another key area of healthcare data: medical imaging. With the rising volume of radiology images and the growing need for real-time, compliant access, healthcare organizations face serious challenges in storing, managing, and sharing image data efficiently.
In this post, we’ll dive deep into Amazon HealthImaging, a purpose-built AWS service designed to solve these problems. You will learn what it is, how it works, the benefits it offers, and why it has become a critical component in modern healthcare infrastructure.
What is Amazon HealthImaging?
Amazon HealthImaging (AHI) is a fully managed AWS service that stores and retrieves medical images in the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) format. It is optimized for performance, security, and cost-efficiency, allowing healthcare organizations to manage image data without the burden of on-premises infrastructure.
Healthcare providers often need to retain medical images for many years to meet regulatory requirements. Traditional storage solutions struggle to handle the growing volume of imaging data, especially when clinicians need instant access to it. AHI solves this problem by offering a cloud-native architecture that ensures low-latency access while significantly reducing storage costs.
Launched by AWS to support diagnostic imaging workflows, Amazon HealthImaging integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like SageMaker, HealthLake, and Comprehend Medical. This compatibility allows healthcare organizations to build full-stack solutions that support both data analysis and machine learning.
Key Features of Amazon HealthImaging
Let’s have a look at the key features that make AWS Amazon HealthImaging a transformative solution for healthcare data management.
1. DICOM-Native Storage
Amazon HealthImaging supports the DICOM standard, which remains the global format for storing and exchanging medical imaging data. By using a DICOM-native approach, the service ensures compatibility with existing Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), radiology viewers, and healthcare applications. It eliminates the need for conversion or middleware.
2. High Performance Access
The service is built to deliver low-latency access to medical images, even at scale. Whether a radiologist is accessing a recent CT scan or a machine learning model is processing hundreds of images for pattern detection, Amazon HealthImaging responds quickly. This performance is critical in clinical environments where every second matters.
3. Scalable and Serverless
As a serverless service, Amazon HealthImaging removes the need to provision or manage servers. The system scales automatically based on demand. Healthcare organizations can upload terabytes or even petabytes of imaging data without worrying about infrastructure planning or performance bottlenecks.
4. Cost-Efficient Compression
One of the most compelling features of AHI is its use of lossless compression techniques. On average, organizations reduce their storage footprint by more than 60 percent when compared to storing raw DICOM files. This saving becomes even more significant when considering long-term data retention policies.
5. AI and ML Integration
Amazon HealthImaging integrates with AWS services like SageMaker, making it easy to build machine learning pipelines that operate directly on imaging data. This feature supports use cases such as cancer detection, organ segmentation, and radiology report automation.
6. Security and Compliance
The platform is HIPAA-eligible and includes built-in security features such as end-to-end encryption, access control through IAM, and audit logging. These capabilities help organizations meet regulatory requirements while protecting patient data.
How Amazon HealthImaging Works?
The service operates through a straightforward workflow. Healthcare providers or systems upload DICOM images using the Amazon HealthImaging API or AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). Once uploaded, the images are stored in a highly durable, cloud-native format that supports fast retrieval.
Clients, such as radiology viewers or AI models, can access the images by querying based on metadata. The system allows developers to filter and retrieve images using DICOM tags, such as patient ID, modality, or date of capture. This approach gives healthcare IT teams precise control over image retrieval and supports complex diagnostic workflows.
Amazon HealthImaging also supports pixel data streaming. This means applications can stream just the parts of an image that are needed, reducing bandwidth consumption and improving loading times in low-bandwidth environments.
Use Cases of Amazon HealthImaging in Healthcare
Here are the top use cases of Amazon HealthImaging:
Radiology Workflows
Radiologists need to access images quickly to provide timely diagnoses. Amazon HealthImaging enables instant retrieval of imaging data, even across geographically distributed clinics and hospitals. Clinicians no longer need to wait for physical copies or deal with outdated PACS systems that slow down access.
AI-Powered Diagnostics
Machine learning plays a growing role in medical imaging. Models can now detect tumors, predict diseases, and suggest treatment options. AHI makes it easy to connect stored images to AWS AI services, accelerating model development and deployment.
Telehealth and Remote Sharing
In telemedicine environments, clinicians often need to share images with specialists in different locations. With AHI, healthcare teams can access images securely and in real time from anywhere, improving collaboration and reducing patient wait times.
Long-Term Archiving
Healthcare regulations often require providers to store images for many years. Amazon HealthImaging reduces the cost and complexity of long-term storage while ensuring data remains immediately accessible. This capability eliminates the trade-off between performance and retention.
Integration with Other AWS Health Services
Amazon HealthLake
While Amazon HealthImaging focuses on imaging data, Amazon HealthLake specializes in structured health records such as diagnoses, lab results, and medications. When used together, these services provide a holistic view of the patient’s condition by combining image data with clinical context.
Amazon Comprehend Medical
Comprehend Medical extracts information from unstructured text such as radiology reports. By connecting imaging data from AHI with insights extracted from related reports, providers can build end-to-end analytics pipelines that support clinical decision-making.
Amazon SageMaker
Developers can train machine learning models on medical images using SageMaker. These models can then be deployed for real-time or batch inference, enabling capabilities such as automated abnormality detection and predictive diagnostics.
Security and Compliance
AWS designed Amazon HealthImaging to meet the strict security and privacy requirements of the healthcare industry. The service uses encryption in transit and at rest. Access is managed using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), allowing organizations to implement fine-grained permission policies.
Audit logging through AWS CloudTrail provides visibility into access and usage patterns. This transparency supports compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and HITRUST.
Benefits for Healthcare Organizations
Amazon HealthImaging delivers value in several key areas:
- Operational Efficiency: Eliminates the need for complex infrastructure and PACS systems.
- Faster Diagnostics: Enables near-instant access to imaging data.
- Cost Savings: Reduces storage and maintenance costs with lossless compression.
- Scalability: Supports growth without requiring architecture redesign.
- AI Enablement: Makes imaging data accessible to AI/ML tools.
- Security and Compliance: Aligns with healthcare data governance standards.
These benefits make Amazon HealthImaging a strong choice for hospitals, research institutions, diagnostic labs, and digital health startups.
Final Thoughts
Amazon HealthImaging offers a modern, scalable solution to the long-standing challenges of medical image management. Its ability to deliver high performance, integrate with AI tools, and support secure global access transforms how healthcare organizations handle diagnostic data. As medical imaging continues to grow in volume and clinical importance, cloud-native solutions like AHI will play a critical role in improving patient care and operational efficiency.
For healthcare providers planning to modernize their infrastructure, integrating Amazon HealthImaging as part of broader AWS migration services can unlock significant operational and clinical benefits. By moving imaging workloads to the cloud, organizations not only reduce costs but also gain the agility to innovate faster and deliver better patient care.
Stay tuned for more insights into how AWS is reshaping the future of healthcare through cloud technology.