What is Azure Health Data Services?
Azure Health Data Services is a managed platform for healthcare data that supports industry standards like FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), DICOM (medical imaging), and IoT data from medical devices. It provides a unified foundation for building healthcare applications that need to exchange data across systems.
The service handles compliance requirements like HIPAA, HITRUST, and GDPR, reducing the burden on development teams. Data is stored and processed in a way that meets healthcare industry regulations.
Core Features
- FHIR service: Store and query clinical data using the HL7 FHIR standard
- DICOM service: Manage medical images (X-rays, MRIs, CT scans)
- MedTech service: Ingest and normalize data from medical IoT devices
- Conversion APIs: Transform legacy HL7v2 and C-CDA data to FHIR
- De-identification: Remove PHI for research and analytics use cases
Typical Use Cases
Healthcare organizations use this service to build patient portals, integrate electronic health records, store and view medical images, and analyze clinical data. It enables scenarios like population health analytics, clinical decision support, and remote patient monitoring.
Benefits
- Pre-built compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, and GDPR
- Standard APIs reduce integration complexity
- Managed service eliminates infrastructure operations
- Integration with Azure AI services for clinical NLP
Frequently Asked Questions
What is FHIR and why does it matter?
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a modern standard for exchanging healthcare data. It uses REST APIs and JSON, making it easier to integrate than older standards like HL7v2.
Can we migrate existing HL7v2 data?
Yes. Azure Health Data Services includes a conversion service that transforms HL7v2 messages to FHIR resources, enabling migration from legacy systems.
Is the DICOM service suitable for large image volumes?
Yes. The DICOM service is designed for enterprise imaging workloads. It supports standard DICOM operations (STOW, WADO, QIDO) and integrates with Azure Storage for cost-effective archival.
How does MedTech service work?
MedTech service ingests data from IoT devices through Azure Event Hubs, normalizes it using customizable mappings, and stores it as FHIR Observations. This enables integration of wearables and bedside monitors with clinical systems.
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory helps you implement Azure Health Data Services: FHIR data modeling, system integration, and compliance configuration.
