Building a healthier future for women: How AWS customers are transforming women’s health across the lifespan

How AWS customers are transforming women’s health across the lifespan

Every May, Women’s Health Month reinforces that the health of women is a global imperative. The data tells a sobering story: Women represent half of the global population, but only 5% of health research funding focuses on women’s health issues. Women spend $15.4 billion more out-of-pocket on healthcare than men, even after controlling for maternity care. Despite living longer than men in most countries, women do so with more disability. And the economic stakes are enormous: Closing the women’s health gap could unlock $1 trillion in annual global GDP by 2040.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we believe cloud and AI technology are powerful tools to address these challenges. This Women’s Health Month, we spotlight six organizations supported by AWS social impact credits that are using the cloud to change what’s possible for women’s health. Together, their work spans the arc of a woman’s life from adolescence to cancer research, showing what happens when technology meets women where they are.

Adolescence

Breaking taboos and empowering girls through digital health

For 1.8 billion women and girls worldwide, menstruation is a natural monthly occurrence. Yet in many parts of the world, it remains surrounded by stigma and silence, leaving adolescent girls without the trusted information they need to manage their health with confidence. Girls who lack access to accurate menstrual health information are more likely to miss school, experience anxiety, and face long-term consequences for their well-being. For many, the issue is not only access to information but also whether digital platforms are safe, relevant, and designed for their realities.

Oky is more than a period tracker. It’s a girl-centered digital public good co-created with adolescent girls to close critical gaps in health knowledge, digital access, and confidence. Today, each new country localization involves at least 200 adolescent girls, including girls with disabilities, and their social circles. The result is a gamified, lightweight application that functions fully offline, requires no personally identifiable information, supports shared devices, and works on lower-end smartphones with older operating systems, meeting girls where they are in their digital realities.

With AWS Cloud infrastructure supporting its open source platform, Oky continues to scale while maintaining local ownership and trust. Oky is now localized across more than a dozen countries across Asia Pacific and sub-Saharan Africa, available in over 25 languages, and reaching over 1 million users.

“Oky shows that technology can go beyond delivering trusted health information. When it is built with girls and for their realities, it helps shift confidence, conversations, and access to knowledge,” says Gerda Binder, senior advisor for gender and technology at UNICEF. “Cloud infrastructure and AWS support enable us to bring that vision to more adolescents and their communities, safely and responsibly.”

Reproductive health

New class of therapy for bacterial vaginosis

As women move into their reproductive years, they face health challenges that have long lacked effective solutions. Bacterial vaginosis (BV) is one of the most common vaginal conditions affecting women of reproductive age, and one of the most undertreated. Associated with preterm birth, sexually transmitted infections, and infertility, BV has lacked effective, durable treatment options for decades. Ancilia Biosciences is working to change that.

Ancilia is a biotechnology company harnessing bacteria’s natural immune system, CRISPR, to develop a new class of live biotherapeutics that are immune to predatory viruses. Their initial focus is on treating BV using the microbiome, which is made up of the beneficial bacteria that play a critical role in maintaining vaginal health. Ancilia’s solutions use AWS AI and high-performance computing services to identify and characterize the viruses’ genomes to develop therapies targeting destructive viruses that otherwise undermine beneficial bacterial therapies.

“Our goal is to apply our advanced analytic and biological tools to unlock the vast potential of an entirely new class of therapies with major applications in both women’s health and beyond,” says Dr. Alexandra Sakatos, co-founder and CEO of Ancilia Biosciences.

Maternal health

Bringing care to the world’s hardest-to-reach mothers

For expectant mothers in the world’s most remote communities, the gap between needing care and receiving it can be a matter of life and death. Across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, millions face the same reality: a health system that ends where the paved road does.

Medic designs and supports open source software for health workers in hard-to-reach communities. As the technical steward of the Community Health Toolkit (CHT), an open source solution supporting over 182,000 health workers across 24 countries, Medic has facilitated more than 263 million moments of care.

“Community health workers are the backbone of last-mile care—and when we equip them with the right digital tools, we close the gap between where health systems end and where families live,” says Shreya Bhatt, co-executive director of Medic. “The CHT gives health workers an accessible, context-adapted system to track mothers before, during, and after delivery, identify and refer risks early, and connect remote communities to the wider health system. AWS is a critical part of how we deliver that at scale: It provides the secure, reliable cloud infrastructure to serve millions of people globally, while keeping costs sustainable for the governments and partners who own these systems.”

A clearer view in the delivery room

Maternal and fetal risks related to childbirth remain a critical challenge with the United States, which ranks 65th among industrialized nations in maternal deaths and has the highest rates of maternal and fetal mortality of any developed country. While the reasons for this are multifactorial, three compounding factors include difficulty getting clarity from clinical data, challenges with communication across care teams, and inability to maintain consistent care delivery across every shift. To address these problems, CareIntellect for Perinatal* was developed by GE Healthcare, built on six decades of fetal monitoring expertise and informed by more than 75 million births. The cloud-based solution unifies raw waveform data, nursing inputs, and other essential clinical data elements into a view that helps clinicians in labor and delivery units hone in on what matters most instead of navigating multiple systems and receiving delayed updates.

“Input and feedback from clinicians was fundamental to the solution’s development,” says Jeff Caron, chief digital and technology officer of patient care solutions at GE HealthCare. “That clinical voice informed every stage of development to help ensure relevance and impact at the point of care.”

Screening and prevention

Fueling AI-driven breast cancer research through open data

The Registry of Open Data on AWS also advances breast cancer research by hosting five breast cancer-focused datasets that are freely available to researchers worldwide. These datasets span the full diagnostic pipeline: the RSNA Screening Mammography Breast Cancer Detection Dataset provides nearly 20,000 imaging studies to help develop AI that streamlines mammography evaluation, while Emory University’s EMory BrEast Imaging Dataset (EMBED) offers 3.4 million mammograms.

On the computational pathology side, Radboud University Medical Center contributes two complementary datasets: the CAncer MEtastases in LYmph nOdes challeNge (CAMELYON) Dataset, with 1,399 whole-slide images for detecting breast cancer metastases in lymph nodes, and Tumor InfiltratinG lymphocytes in breast cancER (TIGER), the first challenge dataset for automated assessment of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes, which is an emerging biomarker that helps target immunotherapy and reduce reliance on chemotherapy. Guy’s Hospital London’s Guy’s Breast Cancer Lymph Nodes (GRAPE) dataset rounds out the collection with 1,523 high-resolution lymph node images from 177 patients. Together, these datasets provide a freely accessible foundation for building AI tools that can improve breast cancer detection and treatment for all women, everywhere.

Cancer research and discovery

Powering AI-driven discovery at global scale

Every year, over 740,000 women worldwide are diagnosed with gynecologic cancers, with ovarian and endometrial cancers accounting for nearly 90,000 new diagnoses and over 26,000 deaths in the United States alone. Progress has been slow, not because the science isn’t there, but because the necessary infrastructure doesn’t exist.

Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance (OCRA) is changing that by moving beyond funding research to powering the infrastructure that enables it. Their Community Accelerated Research Exchange integrates patient data, scientific collaboration, and continuously updated global research intelligence into a single AI-powered ecosystem that delivers tailored insights from thousands of studies worldwide, highlights relevant conferences and scientific events, and gives every part of the gynecologic cancer community a single destination for the information most important to them. Two core components make up the research exchange:

1. The Living Lab – A patient registry capturing longitudinal, consent-driven real-world data, giving patients an active role in advancing research while creating a continuously expanding dataset grounded in lived experience, treatment history, and outcomes.
2. The Discovery Lab – A trusted research environment built on the Cirro Bio data platform—technology already trusted by more than 160 organizations—empowering researchers to integrate clinical, genomic, imaging, and spatial datasets and deploy AI workflows within compliant infrastructure.

“The Community Accelerated Research Exchange represents a fundamental shift in how discovery happens,” says Audra Moran, president and CEO of OCRA. “By bringing patients, researchers, and clinicians into a single, AI-powered ecosystem—and breaking down the silos that have slowed progress for far too long—we are accelerating breakthroughs that can improve care today while driving the discoveries of tomorrow. Powered by AWS Cloud resources, this global AI initiative enables the data-intensive gynecologic cancer research needed to accelerate discovery at unprecedented scale.

The arc of a life, the promise of technology

The organizations spotlighted here represent a powerful truth: When cloud and AI technology are placed in the hands of mission-driven innovators, the impact on women’s health can be transformative.

From adolescence to midlife and beyond, these stories show what’s possible when technology serves women’s health holistically across every stage of life.

Amazon is also its broader Together framework, a companywide model for connecting customers, employees, and communities through shared Amazon experiences. One part of that framework, In This Together, creates pathways for communities, organizations, and individuals to access Amazon resources and opportunities.

In healthcare, that includes bringing forward Amazon organizations such as AWS Skilling and Social Impact, which helps connect innovation and partnership to practical pathways that expand access and support stronger outcomes across the health ecosystem.

At AWS, we are committed to supporting this work. We provide cloud technology and technical expertise to organizations working to close the gaps in women’s health research, access, and outcomes.

Learn more about how AWS supports women’s health

1. Jacaranda Health’s journey to support pregnant people in Africa
2. Korea University in conducting research on East Asian women’s risk for autism
3. Social impact
4. Open Data Sponsorship Program for high-value datasets
5. Health innovation

*CareIntellect Perinatal, formerly Mural Perinatal Surveillance, a 510(k)-cleared device in the U.S., is the product name. CareIntellect for Perinatal might appear in descriptive content. Not all features and functionality are available in all markets. Product configurations are subject to change without notice. Availability is dependent on regional regulatory authorizations.