One of the industries that cloud technology has had the biggest impact on is healthcare—specifically in terms of efficiencies and outcomes. What’s more, the healthcare industry is only barely accessing the tools available to them, according to Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts.
AWS has been used across India, the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S., and in all of these markets, the healthcare industry has seen great success. One example is ESanjeevani, which is an Indian browser-based telemedicine platform. ESanjeevani was developed to help get medical attention to citizens for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week as COVID-19 ravaged the country. The reach of ESanjeevani now makes it possible for over 1 billion people—which is more than 80 percent of the population—to access healthcare with ease.
ESanjeevani has 4,000 doctors which allows for 150 synchronous consultations to take place at a time.
Another example of cloud computing advancing the healthcare industry comes from the partnership between Genomics England and Lifebit. Together, the 2 companies used cloud computing to perform medical research in which researchers were able to utilize strict controls to access relevant databases. They used these databases to do genome sequencing of COVID-19 patients. They took samples from 20,000 people with severe infections and 15,000 patients with more mild cases.
This research allowed research organizations and pharmaceutical companies to not only develop better diagnostics and treatments for COVID-19 patients, but it helped improve the vaccine programs.
In the Netherlands, Radboud University Medical Centre, which is an EMRAM Stage 7 hospital, began using what it calls the “Grand Challenge.” The Grand Challenge called upon AI developers and clinicians to help create solutions to help fight COVID-19 by better classifying lung abnormalities.
This world-wide platform now has more than 45,000 researchers who have signed up to participate, which just goes to show the scale that cloud research can reach.
Not to be left out, the U.S. has also been utilizing cloud computing technologies in the healthcare sector too. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, has been using AWS to decrease the amount of inefficiencies as well as to improve/optimize operating room schedules. This is being done in an effort to improve the flow of patients through the medical center’s operating rooms.
Access to healthcare and better engagement is the goal
According to the international healthcare director and chief medical officer at AWS, Dr. Rowland Illing, while cloud computing technologies made it possible to see positive improvement and impactments to healthcare during this generation’s worst global health crisis, in reality, we’re only just scratching the surface in terms of how much further we can achieve for the healthcare industry through cloud tech.
Through using AI tools and machine learning capabilities, not only our healthcare tech and consulting partners, but also our healthcare system as a whole can work to build solutions that will allow even more patients to be helped in the future. What’s more, through the use of these technologies, we can also achieve greater levels of trust throughout the healthcare system as a whole.