Innovation Stories—How AWS helps drive transformation in Ireland’s public sector

To help reduce the spread of COVID-19 in Ireland, the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) used AWS to build a scalable and reliable COVID Tracker application. With AWS, HSE gained the agility and scalability needed to develop, test, and build the first prototype of the app. The first version of the app was available in just 2 days. Designed to improve the speed, accuracy, and effectiveness of contact tracing, the app received one million downloads in the first 36 hours, and 1.54 million by the fourth week, equivalent to 30 percent of Ireland's population. Because of the cloud's elasticity, the COVID Tracker app can seamlessly scale to meet fluctuating demands as pandemic activity changes.

The implementation of cloud-based telehealth services benefits Irish patients in hard-to-reach areas and those with mobility issues—all without having to step into a doctor’s office. When Caredoc, an out-of-hours family general practitioner (GP) service, were tasked with supporting the HSE Live helpline during the COVID-19 pandemic they experienced significant call volumes from concerned citizens. Caredoc’s clinicians had to triage calls and phone back citizens with suspected COVID-19 symptoms to further evaluate their condition and consider next steps. Caredoc implemented this new service to support HSE Live in just 1 week with the help of Equal Experts, an advanced consulting member of the AWS Partner Network, using UX Forms, a cloud-based application built on AWS. UX Forms uses Amazon Aurora, AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The solution lets call handlers log incoming calls, allocate them to clinicians to follow up, and track and monitor call outcomes. By implementing the new solution, Caredoc reduced manual tasks and call tracking, saving them 2 hours of administrative work per day. This new process helped Caredoc resolve patient calls 30 percent faster than before, which improves the patient experience and frees up time to help others in need.

Wellola is an Irish digital health software firm that provides secure video and patient portal services to healthcare providers. Wellola experienced a spike in users when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Using AWS, Wellola scaled quickly to meet demand and deliver a reliable, secure, and cost-effective platform that met regulatory standards and HIPAA and GDPR requirements. Today, Wellola is providing over 600 general practitioners, governments, allied healthcare providers, charities, and Section 38 entities in Ireland, United Kingdom, and Italy with secure video consultations, messaging, digital letters, record keeping, and payment facilities. These services help these organisations manage and mitigate the impact of the pandemic. Wellola is all-in on AWS and worked with AWS Partner Network (APN) partner, DNM, to optimise the security and scalability of the software-as-a-service platform. Wellola uses Amazon EC2, AWS Key Management Service, AWS Fargate, and Amazon Aurora along with a suite of AWS security services including Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail.