AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: health and human services

4 ways AWS can help with Medicaid unwinding

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.

Supporting state agencies with Medicaid unwinding outreach: Creating a multi-lingual two-way messaging system

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.

HHS pavilion

Now access the Health and Human Services Cloud Pavilion: An online, interactive learning environment

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.

Saguaro National Park

A streamlined, mobile-first approach to service delivery for counties and states

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.

Photo by Michael Daniels on Unsplash

Three ways Health and Human Services agencies benefit from the cloud

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.

State of Maryland transforms social services using AWS

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.

Open Data, Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence: How the Cloud is Taking on the Opioid Epidemic

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.

Using Health Data to Make More Efficient Use of Medicaid Resources

Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies collect an endless amount of data that, however abundant, often fails to paint the whole picture. According to NextGov, 74 million Medicaid records are now hosted in the AWS Cloud. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is porting in five years or more of records from 50 states—totaling 72 […]