AWS commits additional $20M to tackle health equity disparities through cloud technology

Nonprofit Jacaranda Health, an AWS Health Equity Initiative customer, helps mothers and newborns in Sub-Saharan Africa get the care they need.

In 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the AWS Health Equity Initiative as a three-year, $40 million commitment to help solve gaps in health equity. Since then, 229 organizations have contributed innovations to the program to help address disparities in social determinants of health around the world. Having distributed more than $30 million of the original funds, we see even greater potential to support more organizations using the cloud to make a difference in the health and lives of underserved populations. Today, AWS is announcing an additional $20 million in funding for the Health Equity Initiative, bringing the company’s total commitment to $60 million in cloud credits and technical expertise.

The Health Equity Initiative is also adding a new funding area to address the impact of climate change on health. This is because environmental factors can vastly affect health. AWS will now prioritize projects that specifically:

• Increase access to high-quality, culturally responsive health services
• Promote resilient communities by increasing access to responsive social and community support
• Mitigate the impact of climate change on health and quality of life

The World Bank estimates that more than 700 million people are unable to meet their basic needs related to healthcare and social services, broadly known as social determinants of health. Eighty percent of health and quality-of-life outcomes as well as health risks are driven by these factors.

“We’ve seen participants in the Health Equity Initiative create incredible solutions that effectively address the equity gaps in accessing quality health services. Organizations have been able to use cloud technology to invent new ways to provide critical care to historically underserved populations in projects across 28 countries,” said Danielle Morris, global health equity lead at AWS. “From helping build more diverse health data stores to using artificial intelligence (AI) for early stroke diagnoses, these organizations are developing solutions that are changing the game for populations with otherwise limited access.”

Participants in the program range from startups to nonprofits to large enterprises, and offer a wide array of solutions, from apps that span transportation support and better follow-up care, to the surveillance of diseases that pass between humans and animals, and beyond.

Expanding access to gender-affirming care

The FOLX app provides tailored healthcare for the LGBTQIA+ community.

One such organization is FOLX, a US startup that launched in 2020, offering technology-enabled healthcare tailored to serving the physical and mental health needs of the LGBTQIA+ community. With support from the Health Equity Initiative, FOLX grew its subscriber base by more than 40 percent and expanded from 26 states to all 50. FOLX now serves tens of thousands of patients across the US, offering virtual primary care, gender-affirming care, and mental health services. FOLX runs on AWS and relies on the AWS Cloud to power important services such as content delivery, website hosting, partner integrations, data storage, identity management, and serverless tasks.

“FOLX considers AWS to be a crucial supporter in its efforts to extend access to quality health care across a traditionally underserved population,” says Ryan Scharer, CTO of FOLX. “Our participation in the Health Equity Initiative helped us expand our services via cutting-edge cloud services so that we could serve a growing patient base more effectively to offer care that meets their needs, in the ways that best serve them, with remote telehealth care, medication delivery, and more. AWS allowed us to create a single, coherent product by coordinating the activities of over a dozen third party services, and to do so in a way that safeguards the privacy and security of our members.”

Achieving quality, timely care for mothers and newborns

 Another group that often doesn’t get the care they need are mothers and newborns, particularly in underserved regions. According to the Atlas of African Health Statistics, nearly 99 percent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries. More than half of those deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 525 mothers die every 100,000 live births and 27 newborns every 1,000 live births. Jacaranda Health is looking to help reduce these numbers. This nonprofit works with governments to deploy affordable and scalable solutions through government hospitals to sustainably improve the quality of care and maternal and newborn outcomes.

PROMPTS technology helps improve maternal health in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Jacaranda’s flagship service, PROMPTS uses AWS AI and machine learning (ML) tools to empower women to seek timely, appropriate care through two-way SMS text exchanges. The platform improves decision-making throughout a woman’s pregnancy journey by sending mothers gestation stage-specific text messages. Additionally, an AI-enabled helpdesk service triages and responds to mothers’ questions, and sparks a rapid referral chain if a risk is identified. Attendance for prenatal care checkups among PROMPTS users has increased 27 percent, twice as many mothers participate in postpartum family planning services, and 80 percent of women referred to care by the helpdesk, receive it.

“AWS support through the Health Equity Initiative has been instrumental in helping us grow our service to help ensure that mothers are getting the care they need through cutting-edge cloud services,” said Jay Patel, head of technology at Jacaranda Health. “The accuracy by which we’re able to read, respond, and triage mothers has grown [from 78% to 88%], and we’re able to capture better data about their care experience – helping health system administrators make more timely and impactful decisions.”

Driving patient engagement and medication adherence for underserved populations

Healthvana messages, like this smartwatch example, help increase medication adherence and patient engagement.

Staying on top of medications can be life-saving. For some medications like pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, it can mean preventing deadly infections like HIV, when taken as prescribed. Healthvana’s data-driven communication platform is used by healthcare providers to manage and communicate with their patient populations, leading to better health outcomes and lower costs. The company sends out more than 20,000 messages a month over the AWS Cloud to help patients adhere to medical regimens and better communicate with their medical providers. Healthvana, a US online healthcare organization, has been able to use the cloud to support 500,000-plus patients and more than 400,000 PrEP-related health visits in the past two years through participation in the Health Equity Initiative. Notably, patients with a Healthvana PrEP Care plan are twice as likely to come back for their first refill when compared with patients not connected to Healthvana.

“It’s been great to work with a company like AWS, who is committed to bridging gaps in health equity, in increasing access and equitability for health services by enabling us to quickly and easily scale our services in the cloud,” said Gabriella Palmeri, head of partnerships, Healthvana. “We continue to work with AWS as a leader in cloud technologies for healthcare, and we are looking forward to tapping into their generative AI features for future offerings.”

Innovators wanted

The work is just beginning and AWS is excited to support many more organizations of all sizes from around the world. Working to solve the health equity gap? We encourage you to apply for the AWS Health Equity Initiative. We accept applications three times a year, with the next cycle closing on March 31, 2024.