Tag: health and human services

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, New Mexico’s Human Services Department (HSD) needed a new way to deliver contact center services safely and found it with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using Amazon Connect, a cloud-based, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered contact center, HSD scaled to meet demand and enabled workers to answer people’s questions from their homes.

Spending on healthcare per person in the Asia Pacific region is now 80 percent higher than it was in 2009. Citing a recent report commissioned by the AWS Institute, this blog post identifies potential benefits, such as cost savings of USD 21.6 billion if all nine countries studied in the report transition their hospital IT to the cloud.

In 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the AWS Health Equity Initiative as a three-year, $40 million commitment to help solve gaps in health equity. Today, AWS is announcing an additional $20 million in funding for the program, bringing the company’s total commitment to $60 million in cloud credits and technical expertise. Read this post to learn more.

Beginning on April 1, 2023, state Medicaid agencies (SMA) will have one year to “unwind” temporary COVID-era changes and return to pre-pandemic ways of working. A major part of that will be re-verifying that all 91 million members still qualify to receive Medicaid benefits. For nearly a year, AWS has supported SMAs with in-house Medicaid expertise to identify unwinding issues and develop solutions to address them. The top four concerns that SMAs have shared are in approaching outreach and engagement, staffing shortages, returned mail, and reporting capabilities. Learn how AWS can help states across the country overcome these challenges across different scenarios.

A key focus for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and state Medicaid agencies is making sure those eligible for Medicaid maintain coverage and supporting transition to alternatives. Medicaid agencies need to conduct outreach to make their millions of members aware of the process for redetermination. With cloud-based tools from AWS, state agencies can conduct this outreach using no code/low code, serverless, elastic services that can scale to two billion text messages a day. In this blog post, learn how to set up a multi-lingual, interactive SMS message campaign that can automatically verify and update member information on file based on member responses.

State and local governments and health and human services (HHS) agencies provide key services to the nation’s most vulnerable and at risk populations such as healthcare, nutrition, economic, and other social support programs. HHS organizations were among the first to feel the impact of COVID-19 and its effects continue to linger and test aging infrastructure and limited technology systems. State and local government agencies made mission critical decisions to address those immediate needs and are preparing for resiliency moving forward. For this, they turned to the cloud. To help organizations discover how the cloud can help, Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the Health and Human Services Cloud Pavilion, an online, interactive learning environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic magnified the health and financial strain in communities across the country. Before the pandemic hit, Wildfire, a state association for Community Action Agencies, was working with Prefix, an AWS Partner Network Technology Partner, to develop a cloud-based solution for utility and rental assistance. When the City of Phoenix requested they support the distribution of $20 million CARES Act funds, they shifted their resources and existing infrastructure and, in a matter of weeks, stood up a repeatable public-facing solution.

Health and human services (HHS) agencies are in the midst of dramatic change, with ever-growing transaction volumes and increasing demand for new services and visibility into data. Looking for new ways to manage constituent demands, the agencies are turning to the cloud to run mission-critical applications that administer healthcare and social benefits programs for millions of beneficiaries, resulting improved system agility, security, and costs.

The Maryland Department of Human Services (DHS) is the state’s primary social service provider. Through 24 local social services agencies, the department assists people in economic need, provides preventive services, and protects vulnerable children and adults in each of Maryland’s 23 counties and the City of Baltimore.

The recent Winter Innovation Summit in Salt Lake City, Utah, showcased a breakthrough Sundance documentary, Dying in Vein. Its filmmaker, Jenny Mackenzie, joined a panel of public health and technology leaders, including Dr. Bill Hazel, former Secretary of Health and Human Resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Alex Chan, CEO of the Clinton Foundation Health Initiative, to discuss opiate and heroin addiction, which, as the film highlights, claims an average of 90 lives in the U.S. daily. A prevailing theme that emerged cast the opioid epidemic as an issue of public health – rather than one of criminal justice – and pressed the role of technology in mitigating its risks.