Category: Healthcare

Last month, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered the announcement of a new office in Athens, the launch of a new program to help GovTech startups, new education resources, and more. And on our monthly video series The Brief, we covered telehealth. Check out the episode and some of these top stories from last month in this post.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information (NLCHI) provides quality information to health professionals, the public, researchers, and health system decision makers. Through collaboration with the health system, NLCHI supports the development of data and technical standards, maintains key health databases, carries out analytics and evaluation, and supports health research. This post details how NLCHI is able to provide secure and scalable access to their on-premises provincial electronic health record (EHR) system, by trusted and authorized partners who run on AWS, through the use of AWS PrivateLink, Network Load Balancer, and AWS Site-to-Site VPN.

Data is at the heart of healthcare, but our wellbeing is complex. It is a challenge to find the right approach when analyzing or visualizing data. Technology like text-to-speech, augmented reality (AR), and deep learning can help us better understand and explain health data. By designing solutions in the cloud, we can leverage AWS to launch and scale helpful tools as needed, paying for only what we use while keeping data secure.

Even though Amazon S3 provides regional data resiliency, customers often have compliance and business requirements to replicate their data to a second Region that is hundreds (or even thousands) of miles away from their primary location. Amazon S3 replication provides an automatic mechanism to make identical copies of your objects in a destination Region of your choice. Replication enables automatic, asynchronous copying of objects across S3 buckets. Learn how to configure S3 Cross Region Replication with S3 RTC feature, and do a walk-through of how to configure event notification for S3 replication events and configuring Amazon CloudWatch alarms for the replication metrics.

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging health systems around the world. They are responding to an increase in ill patients, managing a lack of resources such as PPE, and focusing on keeping their workforce well. With worldwide deployment of vaccines still underway, health systems will need to continue transforming to adapt to managing COVID-19 alongside other health conditions. Using cloud technology has already provided benefits to health systems during the pandemic—many of which will persist into the recovery phase. AWS is helping healthcare systems accelerate the pace of research, support data-driven decision making, and facilitate the delivery of services to citizens and patients.

AlayaCare, a Canada-based health technology organization founded in 2014, offers a platform for home and community care organizations. The cloud-based platform provides an end-to-end solution for care providers, including back office functionality, client and family portals, remote patient monitoring, and mobile care worker functionality. AlayaCare aims to help care providers by arming them with the technology and data insights they need to deliver personalized care. Using AWS, AlayaCare is building their vision of the future of in-home and virtual care.

The Government of Canada (GC) set ambitious goals at the onset of COVID-19. One goal: to offer a mobile app to notify its users of possible exposures before symptoms appear in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize their privacy. In July, the GC released the COVID Alert app, an exposure notification application. COVID Alert doesn’t require users to enter—nor does it obtain from the mobile device—any personally identifiable information (PII) and doesn’t use location tracking. Let’s take a look at COVID Alert app’s cloud-based architecture and how the app is helping slow the spread of COVID-19, and helping keep Canadians safe while protecting privacy.

This year, global health and economy challenged government, education, nonprofit, and health organizations to rethink operations. With a focus on their mission, organizations quickly shifted to better and more quickly serve their constituents, students, and customers. Many took advantage of ways to innovate and consider adopting the cloud. AWS looked for ways to help these organizations, educating them on the power of the cloud—no matter where they were on their cloud journey—as well as sharing inspiring stories from their peers. Here’s what we learned.

Be it aspirin for headache, or statin for cholesterol, or amoxicillin as an antibiotic, there are small molecules that we refer to as drugs that can offer therapeutic remedy. Given the range of possible molecule to protein combinations, finding the right small molecule that is able to bind strongly to a certain target site and inhibit its function is a time-intensive and challenging feat. Enter VirtualFlow, a new open-source software that performs screens, essentially matchmaking between molecules and proteins. Harvard Medical School researchers developed the VirtualFlow platform that tests compounds through computer simulations. Using AWS and an AWS Cloud Credit for Research grant, the researchers demonstrated that VirtualFlow is able to run on the cloud.

AWS re:Invent is back for 2020, and for the first time it’s all virtual and free. AWS re:Invent has become the world’s premier cloud learning event, and this year, we’ll feature sessions focused on how public sector organizations are using the cloud to improve the lives of constituents, patients, customers, and more. The event, kicking off on November 30 and lasting three weeks through December 18, will feature keynotes, leadership sessions, lightning talks, and core sessions tailored for the public sector. To help you make the most of re:Invent 2020, we created the AWS re:Invent Public Sector Virtual Attendee Guide, and the latest episode of The Brief.