Category: Healthcare

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

Amazon Comprehend Medical is a natural language processing (NLP) service that simplifies the use of machine learning (ML) to extract relevant medical information from unstructured text often found in clinical charts or doctor’s notes. Since the service launched in the AWS Canada (Central) Region in June 2019, it opened up possibilities for Canadian healthcare organizations to better serve patients. Vancouver General Hospital (VGH) and University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers are among the organizations who leverage Amazon Comprehend Medical and Amazon SageMaker, to create their own machine learning models that can triage x-rays to provide a better healthcare experience.

As patients navigate the healthcare system, their records should be easily transferrable between all organizations to ensure continuity of care. Value-based payment programs and increasing consumerism have driven the need for prompt and complete access to clinical information in healthcare systems around the world.