Nonprofits Dedicated to Health: Speeding Time to Cure

At AWS, we put our customers first, meaning we want to make your day-to-day business operations efficient and effective. Using AWS means spending less time worrying about technology needs and more time caring for what matters most: your patients.

Healthcare organizations around the world are using the AWS Cloud to enable rapid recovery of their IT infrastructure and vital data, like Protected Health Information (PHI), and are leveraging AWS to break down silos in research and expand their computing capabilities to greatly speed up time to cures.

In previous posts, we have spotlighted nonprofits dedicated to helping the environment and we shared stories of nonprofits who use the AWS Cloud for humanitarian causes. Below are four nonprofits dedicated to furthering medical research and providing the best patient care possible.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research: The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) is dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease through an aggressively funded research agenda and to ensuring the development of improved therapies for those living with Parkinson’s today. As part of a research initiative to evaluate the use of wearable technology to measure and track Parkinson’s symptoms, MJFF partnered with Intel and is utilizing their big data analytics platform to run a number of research projects. This platform is hosted on AWS’s infrastructure, using various scalable big data and IoT technologies, to collect, process and store large streams of de-identified data from the smartphones and wearable devices of study participants.

“The Foundation is working in collaboration with AWS and Intel to ensure that we have a robust technology platform to run effective research studies. Partnering with AWS and Intel ensures that our data is stored securely and efficiently, and allows us to not have to worry about the IT components of the project and really focus on the objective at hand,” said Lauren Bataille, Senior Associate Director, Research Partnerships, The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Watch this video to learn more about how the Foundation is using big data to gain new insights into Parkinson’s disease and accelerate a cure.

American Heart Association: American Heart Association (AHA), the nation’s oldest and largest voluntary organization dedicated to fighting heart disease and stroke—the two leading causes of death in the world—is building its Precision Medicine Platform on the AWS Cloud.

The AHA Precision Medicine Platform will include a vast array of curated datasets that are centrally stored, easily searched and accessible, and managed on the AWS Cloud. The platform enables researchers and clinicians to aggregate and analyze a rich breadth and depth of data, including longitudinal cohorts, proteomic, genomic, and gene-expression data using a precision medicine approach. This data and analysis will in turn allow researchers to uncover critical cardiovascular disease insights that translate into medical innovations and positively impact millions of lives.

“By using the AWS Cloud, the Platform will harness the power of big data to revolutionize the way cardiovascular research is performed and speed the promise of precision cardiovascular medicine,” said Nancy Brown, CEO, AHA. “The AHA remains steadfast in its commitment to eliminate the tragic global burden cardiovascular disease places on individuals, families, healthcare systems, and entire nations by mapping scientific discovery to the dramatic advances in biomedical research and technology innovation.”

Watch this video featuring Nancy Brown speaking at the AWS Worldwide Government, Education, Nonprofit Breakfast at re:Invent 2016.

Medic Mobile: Medic Mobile is a nonprofit organization with the mission to improve health in the communities that are hardest to reach. The Medic Mobile app, currently in 23 countries in Africa and Asia, is in the hands of 16,000 health workers, each of them surrounded by about 100 households that they give care to. Without the local health workers supported by the app, these patients would have to walk 30-100 miles for medical care.

Since they operate mostly in rural areas, the app runs offline for months if needed. Healthcare workers securely input data about the families and are guided through care by the app, which then smartly syncs the data when they get mobile internet access. Often, this is the first time people are registered into the healthcare system or any system for essential services. Almost 100% of Medic Mobile’s data is hosted in the AWS Cloud.

“With the goal of serving 100 million people in the next five years, we are focused on scalability. AWS allows us to scale up confidently and get our toolkit to the smallest clinics in the most remote areas,” said Josh Nesbit, CEO, Medic Mobile.

Ohio Health: Ohio Health, a nonprofit health organization, is utilizing evolving speech recognition and natural language processing technology to enhance the lives of its customers.

“Amazon Lex represents a great opportunity for us to deliver a better experience to our patients. Everything we do at OhioHealth is ultimately about providing the right care to our patients at the right time and in the right place. Amazon Lex’s next generation technology and the innovative applications we are developing using it will help provide an improved customer experience. We are just scratching the surface of what is possible,” said Michael Krouse, Senior Vice President Operational Support and Chief Information Officer, Ohio Health.

Learn more about what is possible with the AWS Cloud by visiting our Nonprofits & NGOs in the Cloud webpage and check out the healthcare-focused videos from our AWS Public Sector Summit.