The spotlight in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner ecosystem is fixed on the software makers working to extend the capabilities of the platform, but professional service providers that help customers harness the Amazon cloud are also essential. Cloudticity LLC Founder Gerry Miller appeared on theCUBE at the retail giant’s recent re:Invent conference to share how his firm is bringing the benefits of the public cloud to the evolving healthcare sector. The Seattle-based outfit specializes in developing, deploying and maintaining applications on Amazon.com Inc.’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform for organizations subject to the HIPAA and HITECH regulations covering the management of patient data. The challenge that Cloudticity promises to solve is reconciling the sometimes clashing requirements of the various regulations, a task many healthcare providers don’t possess the internal talent to effectively address. “There is quite a bit of regulation and bureaucracy surrounding the protection of protected health information, personal aspects of our lives that we want to ensure don’t get revealed unnecessarily,” Miller explained. “On the other hand, HIPAA and HITECH are specifically designed to ensure that medical records are able to be integrated and viewed in a consolidated way.” Miller said centralization is difficult enough to accomplish as is. Additional security requirements have created silos of information that can make such data all but inaccessible to the outside world. To mitigate that situation, current regulations mandate that organizations must submit patient data to healthcare information exchanges from which the records are made available to peers, a mission he said that AWS is particularity well-suited for supporting. Miller told host John Furrier that the AWS platform provides all the capabilities that Cloudticity’s customers need to meet regulatory demands. For starters, it not only encrypts data both at rest and during transit but also includes a built-in key management system that “does a better job than many smaller hospitals could do on their own.” And for users that seek to become compliant not only with HIPPA but also the NIST standards, AWS offers partner solutions that make it possible to meet the mandate that the information and the keys must not fall under the responsibility of the same vendor. Amazon also requires virtual machines handling healthcare data to run on dedicated hardware, which further strengthens the quality of its service for healthcare providers. And it’s all available at a competitive rate that doesn’t exclude small providers that can’t match the IT budgets of their larger peers. According to Miller, the leadership of AWS also puts Cloudticity – the only one of the cloud juggernaut’s many partners focusing exclusively on HIPAA-compliant solutions – in a better position to capitalize on the rush to meet the federal meaningful use criteria for electronic healthcare records. “The federal government allocated $26 billion to pay out incentives to providers successfully meeting these criteria,” Miller said. “So we chose to play in a market that has a funded $26 billion budget – it’s a great economic situation.”