Tag: healthcare

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) — the technology that won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — lets scientists peer into the molecular “machines” at work in our cells in ways that were previously impossible. Using advanced microscopes, cryo-EM captures images of proteins flash-frozen in vitreous ice, revealing their 3D structure in near-native states. Even as access to this technology improves, many researchers are still limited by computing bottlenecks. The cryo-EM field needs to provide more hands-on training in how to process such large datasets. Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows us to provide training, broadening the impact of this important structural biology technology.

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

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.

As patients navigate the healthcare system, their records should be easily transferrable between all organizations to ensure continuity of care. Value-based payment programs and increasing consumerism have driven the need for prompt and complete access to clinical information in healthcare systems around the world.

Healthcare providers suffer from having to purchase hardware, storage, and licenses, and then renewing all of that when they become deprecated. They have to think ahead how much they plan to grow and then make large purchases considering that growth, which may turn out to be over or under estimated. Effort is spent on matters that are not core to the healthcare business. One of the main solutions for patient’s care is the PACs (Picture Archiving and Communication System). This solution is responsible for storing, retrieving, presenting, and sharing medical images, like X-Rays, CT scans, MRIs, and Ultrasounds. Durability, availability, and lowering expenditures are top priorities for companies hosting PACs solutions.

Rob Moss is the co-founder and president of Seizure Tracker – an organization that gives patients, doctors, and researchers the tools to link seizure activity with anti-epileptic therapies. Together with AWS Partner, Element 84, Rob and his wife, Lisa, have grown Seizure Tracker into the largest database of patient-collected seizure data in the world.

Since the launch of the AWS Canada (Central) Region in December 2016, many organizations have begun using AWS to transform Canadian healthcare infrastructure and services. The entities use AWS to help lower the cost of IT services, provide more focus on patients, improve data security and compliance, improve healthcare clinician and staff productivity, and begin resolving major health problems impacting the general population. From data center migration to machine learning, healthcare authorities, hospitals, and service providers have been focused on the following key trends.

At the AWS Public Sector Summit in Singapore, we hosted an Education User Group where we had students from institutions across Southeast Asia present games and products built on AWS with the support of AWS Educate. The first place winner was Dr. Robo, developed by Chong Jin Wei, a first-year student from National University of […]

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 […]

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. From introductory material to in-depth architectures, the AWS Public Sector Summit featured sessions relevant to healthcare and life science researchers. The full set of session videos are located here, along with slides to match, but in this post, we will […]