Healthcare organizations chose Amazon Web Services over rival cloud computing companies Google and Microsoft for artificial intelligence and machine learning because it was the most mature platform, had good name and brand recognition and came with high reliability, performance, security and privacy, a June 7 KLAS Research report found.
The 13 provider and payer groups surveyed most commonly reported that Amazon Web Services helped save them time, improve the clinical experience and had strong customer service and support, but that they would like to see the company's training be better advertised and have more of a healthcare focus, according to the report.
Boston-based Tufts Medicine and Geisinger in Danville, Pa., are among the health systems that have recently tapped Amazon Web Services to lead their cloud-computing networks.
Of the healthcare groups that participated in the KLAS survey, their top three reasons for using Amazon Web Services were operational optimization (46 percent); patient/member engagement (31 percent); and health/disease management and prediction (23 percent). They were most likely to use the apps Amazon Comprehend Medical, which employs natural language processing to extract medical information from text, and Amazon SageMaker, which developers and data scientists use to build, deploy and monitor machine learning models.
Some of the Amazon-based organizations told KLAS Research they felt Google Cloud wasn't comprehensive enough to meet their needs, too rigid and not focused enough on healthcare, while also expressing concerns about the Microsoft platform's speed, system performance and developer-friendliness.
Microsoft declined to comment to Becker's.
"Our customers tell us they're drawn to Google Cloud for qualities such as interoperability, security, and cutting-edge technology, such as AI and machine learning," Olivia Cornejo, a spokesperson for Google Cloud, said in an email to Becker's. "What makes us unique in the industry is our commitment to growing our healthcare products and expertise."
KLAS Research said it plans to produce similar reports on the Google and Microsoft cloud systems.