AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Healthcare

man and son work in woodshop to build birdhouse

Purpose-built databases: The model for building applications in the cloud

The era of the cloud has simply accelerated the push to microservices as organizations want to adopt new, distributed models for building applications to drive agility, innovation, and efficiency. The AWS portfolio of purpose-built databases can help with this movement. AWS offers a broad and deep portfolio of purpose-built databases that support diverse data models and allow customers to build data driven, highly scalable, distributed applications. This allows you to pick the best database to solve a specific problem and break away from restrictive commercial databases to focus on building applications to meet the needs of their organization.

AWS Public Sector Summit Online 2021 Jam Lounge

AWS Jam Lounge and virtual workshops offer hands-on learning at AWS Public Sector Summit Online

Join us at the upcoming AWS Public Sector Summit Online (April 15-16, 2021) where attendees will have the opportunity to test their knowledge and learn new skills in the AWS Jam Lounge and virtual workshops. Put your skills to the test in the AWS Jam Lounge (Sponsored by Intel and Fortinet) and learn something new by attending virtual workshops

two women discuss something on a laptop in front of a whiteboard

What gives me hope on International Women’s Day

When I travel around the world, I try to spend time with women leaders in different organizations, industries, and walks of life. In the time we have together, I try to learn about their hopes and dreams. In those conversations, I hear both a desire to think big about the future and a struggle to balance the commitments and responsibilities that fall almost exclusively to women. The numbers are clear: the percentage of the women participating in the global labor force is declining. I recently wrote about steps we can take to recover from the last year. Today, I want to share three stories that make me hopeful that we can collectively achieve gender parity. 

Encryption in transit for public sector

Encryption-in-transit for public sector workloads with AWS Nitro Enclaves and AWS Certificate Manager

Government, education, nonprofit, healthcare, and other public sector organizations process and store sensitive data including health records, tax data, PII, student data, criminal justice information, and financial data. These workloads carry stringent security and compliance requirements to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of this data both in transit and at rest. Best practices for protection of data in transit include enforcing appropriately defined encryption requirements, authenticating network communications, and implementing secure key and certificate management systems. In this post, I demonstrate a solution for deploying a highly available and fault tolerant web service with managed certificates and TLS termination performed on customer-managed EC2 Nitro instances using ACM for Nitro Enclaves.

APAC Digital Skills Research

New report: Asia Pacific workforce applying digital skills will need to increase five-fold by 2025

This week, AWS released the report, “Unlocking APAC’s Digital Potential: Changing Digital Skill Needs and Policy Approaches.” Prepared by strategy and economics consulting firm AlphaBeta and commissioned by AWS, the report analyzes the digital skills applied by workers in their jobs today and the digital skills required by workforces over the next five years. The report focuses on six Asia Pacific countries: Singapore, Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea.

female student sitting at laptop at home with headphones listening to lecture

Improving virtual education, economic research, and environmental data: The latest from AWS CICs

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. In the second half of 2020, all those who participate in the CIC program, from students and researchers to the technology teams from AWS, worked on wide-ranging societal problems. Their focus was on improving education with virtual computer labs, working on climate change initiatives, improving economic and healthcare research, and supporting at-risk high school students. What were they up to at the end of 2020?

CDC Panel COVID-19

Sharing best practices on vaccine administration at the CDC National Forum on COVID-19 Vaccine

The US CDC convened the National Forum on COVID-19 Vaccine to share and discuss best practices to help advance the goals of the National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness. The forum brought representatives together from across the US government involved in the response to COVID-19. AWS participated in the forum as a panelist for “Day 2 Town Hall: Using Technology to Manage COVID-19 Vaccination.” AWS has worked closely with many states and jurisdictions looking to quickly design, launch, and mobilize their vaccination administration plans using cloud technology. Learn some of the best practices shared at the forum on how the cloud can help with vaccine administration.

Think Big for Small Business

3 things to like about the now globally available Think Big for Small Business Program

Diversity matters. Governments, countries, cities, agencies, and more recognize the value that diversity brings. According to McKinsey, companies with ethnic or cultural diversity are 33% more likely to outperform on profitability. With this in mind, I am thrilled to announce the global launch of the Think Big for Small Business Program. With the global launch of this program, I wanted to share the three things I like most about it.

hospital staff standing close together with arms crossed torsos only

Digitally revolutionizing workforce management in healthcare

COVID-19 highlighted the existing shortage in personnel within healthcare and is now challenging many hospitals with high staff turnover and sick leave. Planerio created workforce management solutions that help healthcare organizations modernize their workforce administration. Their shift planning software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and takes into account a range of planning variables such as employee qualifications and availabilities, employee preferences and requests, requirements of different shifts and workplaces, legal regulations and tariffs, and more.

AWS City on a Cloud competition 2020 city skyline

Announcing the winners of the AWS City on a Cloud competition

We are excited to announce the winners of the 2020 AWS City on a Cloud competition. Since 2014, we’ve rewarded those who have positively impacted our communities in the City on a Cloud competition. This year, the competition expanded to include finalists from over 14 countries across the globe in search of how organizations are adapting to these unprecedented times and helping cities become more resilient. From building telehealth solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, to improving farmers’ quality of life, to increasing computer science education, the winning cities and organizations went above and beyond to innovate for and with their constituents using the cloud. Check out the winners.