Tag: Canada

In 2019, Grand River Hospital turned to AWS to build the first AWS healthcare data lake in Canada. The data lake was built to house the hospital’s sensitive patient and administrative data while retiring its legacy hospital information systems, comprised of electronic patient record and other administrative systems. Grand River Hospital in Ontario, Canada is a 580-bed community hospital with a yearly operating budget of around $400 million CAD serving a community of 600,000-650,000 people.

Prodigy Game (Prodigy) has a mission to help every child in the world love learning and make education freely available to students globally. Prodigy’s math game – geared toward learners in the first to eighth grade – allows students to hone their math skills with questions delivered according to their individual needs. As their user base grew, so did the strain on their ability to handle the increasing demands. They turned to AWS.

The botany department at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the UBC Data Science Institute are working together to research the evolution and genetic makeup of sunflowers – a critical crop in addressing global food security.

When considering digital transformation, governments tend to focus on the potential drawbacks instead of focusing on the risks of failing to adopt new technologies. A newly released report by Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, “The Risk of the Digital Status Quo,” outlines four risks of forgoing digital modernization in Canada and offers strategies to address those risks.

Purolator, Canada’s leading courier company, embarked on a bold transformation plan to keep it at the forefront of evolving customer expectations. Called Delivering the Future, the company recently launched an aggressive five-year $1B investment plan to step-change its company in four key areas – including accelerating the digital experience for customers by investing in new technology and modernizing its existing infrastructure using cloud technology.

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.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of a Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver. Part of an ongoing relationship between AWS and UBC, the CIC will provide students, staff, and faculty access to cloud technology to advance research projects, while employing Amazon’s innovation processes. The CIC is the first of its kind in Canada.

To support our Canadian customers, we continue to grow our presence across Canada from offering new services to hosting events. Recently, we hosted the second annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Ottawa where we shared the latest AWS updates for the public sector in Canada.

The British Columbia Automobile Association (BCAA) started the mobility revolution in B.C. over 100 years ago when a small group of British Columbians, passionate about cars and mobility, joined together to form an auto club. A century later, BCAA continues to help new generations get to where they need to go, and Evo is one way BCAA meets their changing mobility needs. Evo Car Share is Vancouver’s free-floating car sharing service offering a full fleet of 1,500 four-door, hybrid vehicles.

Governments face stiff competition with the private sector when it comes to recruiting civil servants with digital skills. As they look to innovate and make their services more citizen-centric, government leaders can benefit from bold strategies to recruit diverse, digitally savvy talent. Dr. Wendy Cukier, Director of the Diversity Institute at Ryerson University, explores the challenges facing the Canadian public service and recommendations to develop the federal workforce, in a new paper produced in collaboration with Public Policy Forum and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute. While the paper focuses on Canada, the strategies offered are relevant to leaders around the world.