AWS-HEALTHCARE

-BY RUDRA PEDNEKAR

What will we see in this Document:-

• What is AWS Healthcare
• What are its benefits
• What does it provide to its customers
• A few case studies/ projects

AWS is the trusted technology partner for the global healthcare and life sciences industry.
As the most mature and reliable cloud platform—with an extensive portfolio of healthcare
and life sciences solutions—AWS provides the security and privacy to operate in a highly
regulated industry. With AWS, organizations can increase the pace of innovation, unlock the
potential of data, and personalize the healthcare journey.
Healthcare providers around the world are using AWS to deliver improved care to their
patients. AWS reduces the time and effort required to run existing workloads, and also
provides access to powerful new analytics capabilities, all while meeting the security and
privacy requirements that you expect.

You can save resources by using affordable archiving solution, save space in your hospital by
putting your backup servers in the cloud, and also take advantage of new ways to manage
patient information in your hospital information systems.

Benefits

Efficiently deliver care

Healthcare providers are dealing with multiple pressures that are impacting the bottom line.
AWS helps solve this problem by offering services that are pay-as-you-go, with no minimum
spend requirements, long-term contracts, or technical lock-in.

Improve your security & compliance posture

By running on AWS, you gain access to an environment built for the world’s most secure
organizations. In addition, AWS makes security easier by managing over 1800 security
controls- so you don’t have to.

Broad cloud-based network

AWS can help connect you with the right resources to implement you project. In addition to
support offered directly by AWS, the AWS Partner Network (APN) includes technology and
consulting partners covering a wide range of applications, and the AWS Marketplace offers
healthcare software you deploy with one-click.

Healthcare use cases

Core operations & business continuity
AWS provides solutions for your core operations via our flexible set of services. Avoid
contractual lock-in for the solutions you need to run your organization, and build
applications that are agile yet still meet stringent security requirements.

Care coordination
AWS makes it easier for organizations to innovate in care coordination. Ingest any type of
data, whether it is telemetry from activity trackers, imaging data, or handwritten physician
notes, and use it to help your team make decisions.

Clinical and population health analytics

AWS lowers the barrier for healthcare organizations to perform clinical or population
analytics. Dynamically scale your analytics applications up and down, and dramatically lower
the cost of using data science to help your patients and customers.

Patient engagement
AWS helps healthcare organizations connect with their patients and customers. Our breadth
of services make it simple to ingest data as well as connect mobile devices or sensors to the
cloud. Once the data is stored in AWS it’s easy to analyze the data, or store it short- or long-
term.
Clinical information systems
Running your clinical information system on AWS brings unprecedented levels of scalability,
flexibility, and agility. Deploying on AWS means that you always have the right
infrastructure at the right time, regardless of whether your network covers a city, a region,
or an entire country.

Storage & archiving

Leverage highly durable options for short- and long-term storage that are extremely cost-
effective. For example, you can store data in an archive less than a penny per GB per month.
And our storage services, like all our services, come with pay-as-you-go pricing.

Compliance transparency & hardening

Build applications that improve your security and compliance posture, particularly via
Compliance as Code and services that automate security and compliance, like Amazon
CloudWatch. You can also rely on an ecosystem of technology partners that can improve
monitoring and transparency.

Case studies
hc1 Uses AWS to Turn Billions of Quest Lab Tests into Healthcare Insights

2021
Industry Challenge

Reducing low-value testing in the healthcare system requires developing a high-

performance, scalable analytics platform for the data of billions of lab test results to derive
insights.
hc1 Uses AWS to Turn Billions of Quest Lab Tests into Healthcare Insights

hc1's Solution

hc1 designed its cloud-based hc1 High-Value Care Platform to lower costs and improve
patient care by reducing low-value practices in healthcare. The company partnered
with Quest Diagnostics, a diagnostic information provider with one of the largest lab
datasets in the world, to tackle the issue of low-value care—things such as unnecessary
services, inefficient delivery, and missed prevention—which accounts for 30 percent of
healthcare dollars spent and amounts to $765 billion. To reduce low-value testing, hc1 had
to quickly process data from Quest’s 48 billion lab events at scale and generate real-time
insights in the form of dashboards and visualizations for healthcare providers. “Whether it’s
a lab, a hospital, a health system, or a health plan, or even looking at this nationally, we
have the capability to organize and normalize billions of lab results to identify where low-
value testing is occurring,” says Zach Berg, senior product director for hc1.

Benefits of Using AWS

A third of Americans have had a test performed by Quest, which generates billions of test
results. hc1 uses several HIPAA-compliant Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools to power its
platform to store and process the data from Quest. To ingest the billions of records, hc1
uses big data platform Amazon EMR to streamline the data pipeline before loading the data
into Amazon Aurora, a cloud relational database. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon
ECS) scales capacity so that as the test volume fluctuates, the platform can efficiently tackle
the application of medical lab guidelines or rules to identify low-value testing on every
transaction. So far, the platform has processed more than 10 billion results, including 290
million lab orders organized and associated with 153 million patient profiles, with some
tests being flagged more than 30 percent of the time.

About hc1

Founded in 2011, hc1 is the leader in critical insight, analytics, and solutions for precision
health. hc1 High-Value Care Platform hones, processes, and customizes care for more than
1,000 health systems and diagnostic laboratories nationwide by turning previously static lab
data into personalized healthcare insights. hc1 Platform has processed more than 22 billion
clinical transactions to date.

ClosedLoop.ai Uses AI and Machine Learning to Help Users Identify and Predict High-Risk
Populations

2020
Industry Challenge

Healthcare organizations are navigating a digital “perfect storm.” They are faced with an
industry-wide data tsunami, a need for digital transformation, and an unprecedented shift
into business models that reward value over volume and outcomes over activity. These
changes are motivating payers and providers to find ways to proactively manage the health
of their populations, which begins with finding ways to identify and predict high-risk
individuals.

ClosedLoop.ai’s Solution

ClosedLoop.ai brings explainable artificial intelligence (AI) to healthcare. Its data science
platform creates and deploys models able to predict patients at risk across a variety of
negative health outcomes, ranging from unplanned admissions and ER visits to serious fall-
related injuries and near-term mortality. Models built using ClosedLoop’s data science
platform are highly accurate and easily explainable. They optimize prediction and risk
stratification and include detailed information that helps explain an individual’s risk. This
helps payers and providers concentrate on and tailor their intervention resources to
patients that have the greatest need.

ClosedLoop.ai’s data science platform, which is purpose built and dedicated to healthcare, is
a work bench for data scientists to create better models faster and to manage and monitor
them efficiently once deployed. The platform inputs an array of patient-linkable data to
create models that produce detailed risk profiles, including a risk percentile, change in risk,
contributing factors, and possible next actions.

“The idea of risk stratification has been around for a long time,” says Carol McCall, chief
health analytics officer for ClosedLoop.ai. “We’ve just brought it into the 21st century. What
used to be the inputting of insurance claims data into prebuilt formulas is now the ability to
use any person-linkable data and the latest AI and machine learning methodologies. And
while the scientific and engineering breakthroughs needed to achieve this are impressive,
the opportunities it opens up to promote health and reduce healthcare costs are even more
impressive.”

In one of the platform’s first applications, Medical Home Network, the largest Medicaid-
accountable care organization in the United States, used ClosedLoop.ai’s platform to risk
stratify new Medicaid patients. ClosedLoop.ai was able to improve the accuracy of its risk
stratification by 63 percent, reduce false positives by more than 80 percent, and hone the
list of high-risk individuals for interventions. This made it possible for Medical Home
Network’s care-management teams to more effectively focus their efforts, a change
estimated as being worth $1.5 million the first year.

In one of its more recent efforts, ClosedLoop.ai developed and released the COVID-19
Vulnerability Index (C19 Index), a free open-source tool designed to help healthcare
organizations identify and protect individuals who are most vulnerable to COVID-19. The
C19 Index does not predict who will become infected with COVID-19 or identify where the
virus might spread. Instead, it was created to help identify people with a heightened risk of
severe complications should they become infected. When it was built, and because no data
on COVID-19 cases was available, the C19 Index was developed using a surrogate endpoint
for similar proxy events (e.g., pneumonia or influenza). It calculates vulnerability as a
person’s near-term risk of severe complications from these respiratory infections. The
response to the tool has been overwhelmingly positive. Since its launch, it has been
downloaded and used by healthcare organizations serving more than 10 million people in
the United States.

Benefits of Using AWS

The ClosedLoop.ai platform is a healthcare-specific, cloud-based, automated machine

learning platform that enables rapid experimentation in a collaborative environment. Every
step in the machine learning pipeline—from data cleanup, normalization, feature creation,
model training, hyperparameter tuning, and explainable calculations to deployment and
ongoing monitoring—requires substantial cloud resources. AWS brings significant expertise
in cloud infrastructure and architecture and a robust, HIPAA-compliant environment that is
critical to ClosedLoop.ai’s AI solutions, which allows ClosedLoop.ai to focus on data science
and the needs of its customers.

About ClosedLoop.ai

ClosedLoop.ai is healthcare’s data science platform. It makes it easy and affordable for
healthcare organizations to use data science to improve health, reduce costs, and change
the experience of care. It is committed to bringing healthcare organizations the power to
predict health outcomes in ways that are highly accurate and easily explained and to help
them learn what interventions work and for whom.

Juniper Uses AWS to Keep Aged Care Services Running in Times of Need

2020
By rolling out AWS remote work and learning solutions, Juniper can support business
continuity and connect residents with family and clinicians. Juniper manages aged care
facilities across Western Australia. The organization uses Amazon Chime to facilitate
communication between its communities, Amazon Connect for distributing recorded
information, and Amazon WorkSpaces to enable employees to work from home.

Maintaining Contact During a Pandemic

In response to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, nonprofit aged care

provider Juniper acted quickly to protect vulnerable residents, clients, and employees.
Juniper operates aged care homes and retirement villages and provides home and
community support services for the elderly across Western Australia. As a values-driven
social enterprise, Juniper is highly focused on the physical, spiritual, and mental well-being
of its residents and clients.

The pandemic created a pressing twofold challenge for Juniper. The organization needed to
protect residents from the virus and comply with the Federal Health Department directives,
yet allow people to maintain contact with medical practitioners, family, and friends.
Concerned family members would likewise be seeking frequent updates on residents.
Juniper also needed to connect employees from its head office as they entered a home-
based work environment.

Scalable Video Conferencing Connects Teams

The organization had historically been very traditional in its technology and digital maturity.
Subsequent to the appointment of a new CEO in 2018, Juniper began a digital
transformation journey and chose to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS). When the
pandemic created new, urgent workload demands, Juniper identified Amazon Chime as a
cost-effective, user-friendly video-conferencing service to connect its communities. “Our
strategy is to leverage AWS solutions first,” says Dan Beeston, ICT manager at Juniper.
“Amazon Chime is something we could roll out swiftly and scale with a per-user, per-day
charging structure, unlike other services that charge annual subscriptions.”

Dan and his team worked with the AWS Professional Services team to set up Amazon Chime
for employees in two days and coordinated the first company-wide call for a CEO address.
Previously, the team had been conducting these announcements using a telephony system
for third parties that only allowed eight people to dial in at a time. Other employees logged
in to a Skype for Business session simultaneously. Having two separate systems was difficult
to manage and scale. “It’s likely that 20 percent of our workforce missed out from not being
able to connect,” Dan shares. “Now there are no concerns, with that initial Amazon Chime
teleconference the most successful session we ever had.”

Familiar Interface Eases Adjustment

Juniper’s IT team had three available engineers, supported by AWS Professional Services,
integrate its corporate identity management system Okta with Amazon Chime. By doing
this, employees could log in as usual to Okta and make Chime calls with the click of a button
in the Okta console. “Putting Amazon Chime in a familiar place has alleviated a lot of the
pressure of having to learn—or teach—a whole new identity management system,” Dan
says. Employees can log in to their Okta accounts and be on a Chime call within 2 minutes.

Juniper’s teams have also commented on how simple the system is to use. “Our employees
were concerned about working from home and how it’s going to affect them. Now they can
join a meeting and talk to their colleagues and simply share documents and screens, which
is going to make their lives a lot easier,” Dan adds. The nonprofit has also implemented
Amazon Chime as a training tool, instead of having its trainers travel to office sites across
the country. The team has pointed out the ability to send documents such as training
agendas from within the Chime interface as one of the main benefits. “It’s simple things like
this that are going to make people feel more comfortable in changing and challenging
times,” Dan comments.

Continuing to Serve Its Extending Community

External connections providing full Amazon Chime Pro functionality were set up for general
practitioners, occupational therapists, and clinicians. Juniper operates several care facilities
in the remote Kimberley region of Australia, which has very low connectivity. The
organization is supporting its residents by enabling Chime video calls from tablets placed
around the facility to devices in residents’ rooms.

Preparing for Crisis with a Scalable Contact Center

Many of Juniper’s workforce are casual employees who need regular updates from their
workplace. As such, the business needed a scalable way to distribute recorded information.
A solution such as a toll-free number would be equally critical in preparation for an incident
response when an outbreak occurs at a Juniper facility or when a total lockdown goes into
effect.

In a single business day, AWS Professional Services worked with Juniper to set up Amazon
Connect as an automated contact center. “Amazon Connect is an immediate response to
address the current need. Similar to Amazon Chime, it’s a platform that we can tap into and
scale up rapidly if we face an influx of calls,” Dan explains. “We do not get locked into any
licensing contracts, so once the situation subsides, we can scale back down without
incurring ongoing cost.”

Investing in a Remote Work Culture

As part of its response to changing times, Juniper has introduced Amazon WorkSpaces to
enable its people to work from home. “We did not have a strong remote-working culture;
people don’t have laptops they can take home. The situation with COVID-19 drove us to be
more agile to address our people’s needs,” Dan says. With Amazon WorkSpaces, employees
can access their desktop from any supported device in just a few minutes. Juniper can also
ensure that payroll services as well as accounts payable and receivable are processed on
time, which is vital to maintain business continuity.

Overall, Juniper has been impressed with the scalability and ease of implementation of the
AWS solutions deployed and the security measures in place to prevent panic-induced errors.
“We did have a moment of hysteria where employees started copying files to portable hard
drives and trying to access systems remotely in all kinds of creative and disruptive ways.
With AWS, we’ve been able to stop this and provide employees with a space where they can
safely log in and stay productive,” Dan says.

Post-pandemic, Juniper envisions facilitating more sessions where employees can set up
video chats with residents’ relatives who are unable to visit their facilities. Employees have
also suggested using teleconferencing between multiple care homes to promote extended
social networks for residents, with meaningful activities that enable well-being and
independence. “By using Amazon Chime, Connect, and WorkSpaces, when people come up
with ideas, we can finally say ‘yes,’” Dan concludes. “We can scale the AWS solutions we’re
using in new ways and be more reactive during and after a disaster.”

About Juniper

Since beginning operations as a charity and church agency in 1949, Juniper has grown to
become one of Western Australia’s leading providers of respite, health, retirement housing,
home care, and residential aged care services.
Benefits of AWS

• Helps comply with social distancing regulations for aged care

• Enables executive team to work and meet virtually across a vast state
• Automates distribution of information with a toll-free number
• Ensures vulnerable residents can connect with family
• Connects clinician s and residents to maintain care standards
• Enables the organization to set up and train employees on Amazon Chime in two days