AWS Smart Business Blog
Bringing better healthcare to underserved communities
The Global Ultrasound Institute (GUSI) is transforming patient care in both medically advanced and developing countries through diagnostic imaging. Their mission is to mentor and train healthcare professionals to utilize Point of Care Ultrasound (POCUS) to make better informed clinical decisions, enhance patient engagement, and improve outcomes.
As Dr. Kevin Bergman, GUSI Co-founder and Co-CEO, explains, “Half the planet doesn’t have access to diagnostic imaging. Due to long-standing structural barriers such as lack of insurance, many people also cannot obtain a definitive diagnosis or get timely answers to critical questions, even in the United States.” Working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), GUSI is launching a groundbreaking mobile app that allows practitioners to seamlessly integrate POCUS into day-to-day workflows and operate anywhere.
POCUS, a transformative movement in medicine
Imagine a patient visits their primary-care provider. After a stethoscope examination, the doctor recommends further imaging, requiring the patient to visit an ultrasound technician in a different location, possibly days or weeks later. Next, a radiologist interprets the scans before that report is eventually sent to the referring physician. At this point, the patient must schedule a follow-up appointment with their doctor to discuss findings and a treatment plan. This is a common example of healthcare workflow inefficiencies affecting patients globally, every day.
This process is time-consuming and costly, often requiring patients to validate insurance coverage for every encounter and arrange multiple appointments. As a result, many people can’t access the appropriate level of care. Dr. Bergman explains, “POCUS, an innovative new diagnostic imaging technology, has been developed to address these pressing issues. It allows patients to receive critical healthcare information in real time, at the point of care on their first visit.”
With POCUS, healthcare professionals can augment and replace the traditional stethoscope with an ultra-portable device about the size of an electric shaver, which plugs directly into a common smartphone. It’s as easy to use as a stethoscope, but can capture, aggregate, and analyze thousands of times more data. Like a traditional ultrasound, POCUS views inside the patient’s body, enabling practitioners to provide instant diagnoses to various medical symptoms and conditions—from shortness of breath, swollen joints, maternal issues, pneumonia, blood clots, and even congestive heart failure.
A turning point in diagnostics
Despite the huge potential of POCUS, GUSI quickly recognized that many practitioners weren’t confident using the technology. As Dr Bergman explains, “We’re at an inflection point where diagnosing conditions using this technology is becoming a standard requirement. Yet there’s a big gap not just in global accessibility of POCUS devices, but training practitioners on how to effectively use them.”
That’s why GUSI’s mobile app is so important. Practitioners can upload ultrasound images from anywhere and receive timely expert feedback, improving diagnostic skill sets and patient care. The app also offers interactive virtual training and access to comprehensive learning resources.
To make this possible with an exponentially-growing client base, GUSI needed reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure. With AWS, GUSI now has the scalability and global footprint, as well as access to advanced technologies such as AI to continually innovate. Dr. Mena Ramos, GUSI Co-founder and Co-CEO explains, “We now have over 15,000 healthcare practitioners on our platform in over 60 countries. To maximize training effectiveness, we needed to see the practice images uploaded by all clients and learners. For us, AWS was the clear choice.”
By implementing a fully serverless architecture with AWS Fargate with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), GUSI can automatically scale to demand while reducing operational costs. This also paved the way for a seamless continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution—helping them iterate faster and keep improving services without facing downtime.
Added to this, GUSI needed to isolate environments for stronger risk management and security. AWS helped them build separate environments to enhance security and allow agile development and testing without impacting the production environment. Moving to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service with AWS CloudFormation also enabled GUSI to automate deployments—meaning less time managing resources and more time focusing on innovation.
Addressing healthcare disparities at scale
With the right infrastructure and support, GUSI can now drive global health initiatives, such as training frontline practitioners in Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, Philippines, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Yemen, Malawi, and South Africa. GUSI is also the training partner on the 1,000 Probe Partnership, the largest ever global deployment of handheld ultrasound probes that has already performed over 300,000 scans for pregnant mothers in rural Kenya and South Africa with far-reaching impact on overall health outcomes. In the United States, GUSI initiatives are helping marginalized and underserved patients in public sector health centers in rural Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, and the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, increasing health equity across the nation.
As Dr Bergman says, “Now healthcare practitioners can scan patients wherever they are—in their home, a homeless encampment, rural village, or long-term care facility. We can see those images and help them make the best decision in real time.”
Reimagining healthcare training
GUSI also worked with AWS to launch an AI-powered tool, Sage AITM, to instantly answer ultrasound-related questions with trusted, vetted responses. Answers are generated by a large language model (LLM) trained on GUSI’s educational content and vast, growing clinical image libraries, powered by Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker.
GUSI has also integrated a cloud-based ultrasound simulator to supercharge training. Future app releases will include AI-automated interpretation of real-time ultrasound images. Dr. Bergman concludes: “Without the support of the amazing AWS development team, I don’t think we could do all this. We’re looking forward to continuing to collaborate to push the boundaries of what’s possible in healthcare training and education.”