Category: APN Competencies

Today, we announced the launch of the APN Digital Media Competency, and we’re excited to also announce the launch of the APN Healthcare Competency for APN Partners.

What is the APN Healthcare Competency?

Healthcare providers and payers around the world are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver improved care to their patients by reducing the time and effort required to run existing workloads, and also providing access to powerful new analytics capabilities, all while meeting the high security and privacy requirements expected by the healthcare industry.

APN Healthcare Competency Partners have demonstrated capabilities building solutions for healthcare payers and healthcare providers that store, process, transmit, analyze and secure patient information. Customers who work with Healthcare Competency Partners know they are getting access to innovative healthcare solutions but still have peace of mind that their patients’ data will be treated as carefully and securely as they would treat it themselves. “Being an APN Competency Partner affirms our leadership in delivering HIPAA compliance, secure, complex applications on the AWS Cloud,” said Jason Deck, VP of Strategic Development at Logicworks.

Healthcare Use Cases and Launch APN Partners 

By becoming an APN Healthcare Competency Partner, firms can distinguish themselves by their use case expertise on AWS, making it easier for customers to identify and connect with them to address their specific healthcare business needs. “Through the APN Healthcare Competency, organizations can find quality APN Partners validated from internal AWS teams for healthcare that have the knowledge and experience to help them build a solution that meets all of their requirements,” said Aater Suleman, CEO of Flux7.

Below are the use cases that our inaugural APN Healthcare Competency Partners have demonstrated expertise in on AWS, along with a list of our launch Competency Partners associated with each:

• Clinical Information Systems: Calgary Scientific, Syapse, Practice Fusion
• Population Health & Analytics: IMS Health, Philips
• Health Administration: Captricity, Infor, Pegasystems
• Compliance Services: Aptible
• Consulting Services: Cloudticity, Cognizant, Flux7, G2 Technology Group, Logicworks, Mobiquity

How Can I Apply for the Program?

If you’re an APN Partner with an expertise in Healthcare, and you’d like to learn more about applying to become a Healthcare Competency Partner, click here.

Our goal is to connect AWS Customers with expert APN Partners to support and enable them as they address specific business needs on AWS. One of our most valuable resources for helping bring AWS Customers and APN Partners together is the APN Competency Program.

The goal of the Competency Program is to provide our customers with qualified APN Partners who’ve demonstrated success – both technical and customer – in working on AWS in specialized solution and vertical areas. We feel confident directing our customers to APN Competency Partners, as these APN Partners’ products and solutions on AWS have gone through a thorough validation process by internal AWS teams, including Solutions Architects (SAs) and AWS Product and Services teams.

We want to make it easy for our customers to identify qualified APN Partners to engage, and we’ve launched APN Competencies across a number of different solutions areas that customers have told us are important to them, including Big Data, Storage, Life Sciences, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

We plan on launching a number of new APN Competencies in 2015 based on customer and APN Partner feedback, and today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the APN Digital Media Competency.

What is the APN Digital Media Competency?

AWS provides highly secure, reliable, low-cost, easy-to-scale, global IT infrastructure services that allow sports organizations and broadcasters to store, process, deliver and analyze digital video and media content in the cloud. The AWS service portfolio and APN ecosystem enables digital media, entertainment and broadcasting companies to leverage AWS cloud services to deliver outstanding customer experiences with standard, HD and 4k formats for broadcast and over the top video content (OTT) as well as compelling second screen experiences.

APN Digital Media Competency Partners have demonstrated success in helping Media and Entertainment companies (Film & TV Production, Post-Production, Distributers, OVP, Broadcasters and MSO Companies) by delivering solutions that assist in the creation, management, and distribution of digital content.

Digital Media Use Cases and Launch APN Partners

APN Partners can distinguish themselves by specific use case expertise to allow AWS Customers easily identify how they can help address specific business needs. “Being an APN Digital Media Competency Partner will differentiate our work with – and on – AWS,” said David Stubenvoll, CEO and Co-founder of Wowza Media Systems, who continued, “It demonstrates the confidence of the AWS team in Wowza Media Systems as a streaming media leader and expert. We expect more companies will get from streaming concept to deployment faster, knowing from this designation that Wowza and AWS are a proven combination for any-screen streaming media delivery.”

There are a number of different use cases that our APN Partners focus on in the digital media world. Below we’ve listed each use case focus, along with the inaugural APN Partners who are focused on each use case area:

• Ingest and Distribution: Aspera and Signiant
• Storage & Archive: Avere, T3Media, and Zadara Storage
• Live and File-Based Media Processing: Brightcove, Elemental Technologies, encoding.com, Telestream
• Creative Applications: Sony Media Cloud Services
• Asset Management: MediaSilo, Sony Media Cloud Services, T3Media
• Collaboration: Aspera, MediaSilo, Sony Media Cloud Services
• Streaming Video: Adobe, Elemental, Wowza Media Systems
• Online Video Platform: Brightcove, Ooyala

How Can I Apply for the Program?

If you’re an APN Partner with an expertise in Digital Media, and you’d like to learn more about applying to become a Digital Media Competency Partner, click here.

The AWS Pop-up Loft, located in San Francisco, CA, is a community space established for those interested in AWS to utilize to receive in-person AWS technical guidance, at no charge, on an as-needed basis. As Jeff Barr’s explained, you can think of the Loft as “technical interaction on demand.” In addition to the availability of a number of resources, such as AWS Architect walk-in sessions, AWS technical presentations, AWS technical bootcamps, and self-paced, hands-on labs, we schedule a number of special events at the AWS Pop-up Loft that cover a wide range of topics and interests.

We’re happy to announce our first AWS HealthTech Day on January 29th, from 1:00-6:00 pm! If you’re in the San Francisco area this week, join us at the AWS Pop-up Loft to hear from a number of speakers from across our growing healthcare and life science ecosystem, including APN Technology Partner Syapse, who will be discussing the ways they are re-imagining healthcare and life sciences on AWS. All are welcome to attend, and we expect the audience to be a diverse mix of enterprises, startups, developers, and investors. Come stop by if you’d like to learn all about innovation in the healthcare and life sciences industries on AWS!

HealthTech Day Agenda

1:00-1:30 – Mobile Technology Enables Frictionless Healthcare: Aiman Abdel-Malek, VP Engineering, Qualcomm Life

Healthcare is a critical global issue. US spends over 15% of it GDP on Healthcare. Over 80% of that spend is on patients with chronic diseases. New healthcare policy mandates are now driving care away from the hospital into the home. Qualcomm mobile technology offers a great opportunity to solving the chronic disease management problem through the development of solutions that enable remote care from home. In this talk we will describe the Qualcomm Life developed platforms – 2net data aggregation platform & the HealthyCircles care management platform – that make up the core platforms enabling Qualcomm Life chronic disease management solutions.

1:30-2:00 – The Big Data Revolution in Healthcare: An Investor’s Perspective: Zack Bogue, Co-Managing Partner, Data Collective

2:00-2:30 – 30 Min Break: Q&A/Networking

2:30-3:00 – Architecting for HIPAA Compliance on AWS: Bill Shinn, Principal Security SA, AWS

This session brings together the interests of engineering, compliance, and security experts, and shows you how to align your AWS workload to the controls in the HIPAA Security Rule. You will hear best practices for how to process and store Protected Health Information (PHI) on AWS, and you’ll learn to satisfy your compliance requirements while maintaining agility. This session helps security and compliance experts find out what is technically possible on AWS and learn how implementing the Technical Safeguards in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule can be simple and familiar. We walk through the Technical Safeguards of the Security Rule and map them to AWS features and design choices to help developers, operations teams, and engineers speak the language of their security and compliance peers.

3:00-3:30 – Transforming Cancer Treatment: Using AWS to Deliver on the Promise of Precision Medicine: Jon Hirsch, Founder and President, Syapse and Kristen McCaleb, Program Manager, UCSF Genomic Initiative

In the past ten years, the cost of sequencing a human genome has fallen from $3 billion dollars to $1,000, unlocking the ability for clinicians to use genomics in routine care. As the volume of genomic data used in the clinic begins to grow, healthcare providers are facing a number of new IT challenges, such as how to integrate this data with clinical data stored in electronic medical records, and how to make both available in real time to inform clinical decisions. In this session, find out how UCSF Medical Center and Syapse met these challenges head-on and solved them using AWS, all while remaining compliant with privacy and security requirements. Learn how Syapse’s precision medicine platform uses Amazon VPC, Dedicated Instances, Amazon EC2, and Amazon EBS to build a high performance, scalable, and HIPAA-compliant data platform that enables UCSF to deliver on the promise of precision medicine by dramatically reducing time and increasing the accuracy and utility of genomic profiling in cancer treatment.

3:30-4:00 – 30 Min Break: Q&A/Networking

4:00-4:30: Marrying Research and Real Life to Create Health Information that’s Human…and Relevant to Consumers: Thomas Goetz and Matt Mohebbi, Co-Founders, Iodine

In medicine, there’s no lack of data about how therapies work in a highly controlled, clinical environment. But there’s comparatively meager data about the messy, real life environment where many therapies are administered and taken. Iodine is working to measure this “mess,” both through objective and subjective collection of individual healthcare experiences. The challenge comes in structuring and filtering this data, as well as with harmonizing it with existing clinical data. The reward comes in surfacing this data in ways that allow people to parse a dataset of collective experience to empower consumers to take control of their own health. Learn how Iodine is leveraging AWS to analyze a unique dataset for a computer vision project, and how they’re creating the new wave of targeted, actionable tools that will drive better healthcare decisions, adherence, and outcomes for consumers.

4:30-5:00 – Getting into Your Genes: The Definitive Guide to Using Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon S3 to Deliver High-Performance Scientific Applications: Puneet Siri, Sr Director, Software Engineering, and Shakila Pothini, Associate Director, Cloud Applications, Thermo Fisher Scientific

The key to fighting cancer through better therapeutics is a deep understanding of the basic biology of this disease at a cellular and molecular level. Comprehensive analysis of cancer mutations in specific tumors or cancer cell lines using Life Technologies Sequencing and real-time PCR systems generates gigabytes to terabytes of data every-day that our customers bring together in studies looking to discover the genetic fingerprint of cancer. This data typically translates to millions of records in the database that need complex algorithmic processing, cross application analysis and interactive visualizations with real time (2-3 seconds) response to enable the user to consume such large volumes of complex scientific information. We have chosen the AWS platform to bring this new era of data analysis power to our customers using technologies such as S3, ElastiCache and DynamoDB for storage and EMR services for parallelizing complex computations. This talk will discuss challenges & roadblocks in building data intense, highly interactive applications in the cloud. It will also highlight enhanced customer workflows and highly optimized applications with orders of magnitude improvement in performance and scalability.

5:00-6:00 – Beer and Networking

For more information on the AWS Pop-up Loft and upcoming events, click here. To register for HealthTech Day, click here.

To learn more about Life Sciences APN Competency Partners, click here.

More and more, our customers are asking us to identify APN Partners with proficiency in particular areas to help them solve their specific business challenges. As our customers look to address specific business needs on AWS, we want to make it as easy as we can for them to find the APN Partners who specialize in their areas of need.

The APN Competency Program helps provide guidance for customers by promoting APN Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and customer success in specific solution areas. Attaining an APN Competency allows APN Partners like yourself to differentiate your firm, and to showcase the areas of expertise in which you can provide added value to AWS Customers.

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