Reimagining person-centered health and care with cloud-enabled technologies

Amazon Web Services (AWS) advanced technologies can help reimagine the way healthcare entities deliver person-centered care. Technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) and the ability to manage petabytes (PB) of data help companies achieve actionable insights that improve care. They can drive the ability to build new care models, improve the human experience in their health and care process, and enable clinical professionals to practice at the top of their licenses. In this blog post, I describe some ways AWS helps companies reimagine the delivery of health and care.

Our health and care needs are changing. Our lifestyles are increasing our risk of preventable disease and are affecting our well-being. We are living longer with multiple long-term conditions. The health inequality gap is increasing. And developing personalized health and care is becoming a major driver to deliver higher quality of care at lower costs.

Patients are more different from each other than we might think, even for the most common conditions. It is estimated that only 10 percent of diabetics are similar among each other and only 11 percent of patients with depression are similar. Because of these types of differences, it takes, on average, two-to-three years to find the right therapeutic options for a patient with hypertension.

In 2023, the Health Policy Partnership (HPP) and the European Institute for Innovation through Health Data published Our Health in the Cloud: Exploring the evolving role of cloud technology in healthcare. The report presents cloud technology as a key enabler for more efficient and person-centered care, a population-based approach to health, research that drives innovation, and building resilient and sustainable healthcare systems.

If we think of cancer as an example, when diagnosed early, the overall five-year survival rate for cancer is four times higher. The Munich Leukemia Lab (MLL), a diagnostics and research institution whose mission is to find a cure for leukemia and lymphoma, provides a great example of using advanced cloud-based technologies to accelerate diagnosis and treatment research. Since 2018, more than 2.4 PB of data were created from MLL’s analysis of more than 4,200 patient genomes. MLL uses the latest molecular and information technology (IT)-supported methods to shape the future of hematological diagnostics and therapy.

Thanks to AWS, and the use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) FPGA-based F1 instances to accelerate its genomics data processing and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for cost-effective storage of the data, MLL reduced the turnaround time to process patient genome data from 20 hours to 3 hours. With this faster turnaround time, the progression from research to improved diagnosis was accelerated. MLL is now looking to add parallelization, automation, and machine learning (ML) to expedite genomic analysis and improve diagnostic accuracy.

Adding to the pressures of rapidly changing health needs, more than half of clinical professionals are suffering burnout. The International Council of Nurses warned that there could be a shortage of 13 million nurses by 2030 unless drastic action is taken. A regional report published by World Health Organization (WHO) Europe in September 2022 warned of a “ticking timebomb” threatening health systems in Europe and central Asia. In 13 out of the 44 countries providing data, 40 percent of medical doctors are 55 years old or older, which poses a significant challenge to the sustainability of the workforce.

The top three reasons why clinicians suffer from burnout are: the abundance of unnecessary tasks that do not have a direct impact on patient care, insufficient compensation, and not enough time for patient care. For every hour spent with patients, physicians spend two hours on documentation.

Now we’re seeing the vast promise of generative AI in healthcare and life sciences, with the potential to accelerate innovations and increase efficiencies across the care continuum. For example, with generative AI on AWS, customers can predict protein properties, create customized patient engagements, drive unprecedented levels of scientist and clinician productivity, and streamline manual clinical processes to reduce burden.

AWS HealthScribe is a HIPAA-eligible service that uses speech recognition and generative AI to automatically generate preliminary clinical documentation. With a single API, health teams can automatically generate preliminary clinical transcripts and notes, enabling clinicians to save time and focus on patient care. In this way, health teams build a bridge to better care delivery, especially for vulnerable populations.

With Alexa Smart Properties for Senior Living, it is possible to reduce the digital gap for seniors. Work conducted by Cruz Roja Española (CRE) the Spanish branch of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, in collaboration with the Accenture Foundation, is a great example of bringing humanity and technology together. Around 26,000 vulnerable people from all over Spain will have Alexa voice devices at home to promote their autonomy and minimize loneliness. Residencias Sanitas Mayores, a network of 44 nursing homes in Spain, will use the Alexa experience designed to keep residents connected, informed and entertained.

AWS Cloud technology continues to help the healthcare industry navigate unprecedented challenges. Healthcare organizations around the globe need to develop strategic plans that include the importance of using the latest innovations with cloud-based advanced services and purpose-built models as the key to better health outcomes. In advancing business priorities such as the use of generative AI in healthcare, this knowledge should not be confined to IT departments. Clinically led and advanced cloud-based strategies can best be used as a powerful disrupter in the journey to better health and healthcare.