Dr. Rowland Illing, director of International Government Health for Amazon Web Services (AWS), expressed in a talk during HIMSS 21, the importance of the cloud in the democratization of healthcare.
Dr. Rowlang Illing had a conversation with Sara Mageit, Associate Editor of HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society) where they addressed topics on Digital Health, use of the cloud in health systems, telemedicine and COVID-19 emergency response from a technological approach.
During the talk, Illing explained the tasks and challenges of AWS during the pandemic. And he highlighted the importance of technology in the response to any health crisis. He explained that technology. “Is the core infrastructure on which health services can be built, it provides virtually limitless storage, compute and database capability that health technology partners, and consulting partners, and end costumers can build solutions and services, to serve their patients.”.
He explained that this is one of the missions of AWS Health, to enable access and delivery of patient-centered care, which promotes the digitization of services. “Our mission is to enable that and we need to provide the right services at the right place at the right time, with the right level of security to deliver care,” he pointed out.
The area of AWS Health that Dr. Illing leads, works directly with end customers, like governments, health systems and academic medical centers. They ensure that they have the appropriate infrastructure to perform complex processes related to health services and medical research.
He also explained the importance of cloud technologies for the continuous development of healthcare systems around the world: “Cloud technology can democratize access to important clinical datasets with strict controls, and also the availability of our advanced computing power.”
He also emphasized the importance of tools such as machine learning, which, thanks to the cloud, can reach more people. “Can be made available online, so you don’t need to have them where you are and they can be made available in secure clinical environments and this could also allow patients to access their own data.”
“So, democratize access not only to the researchers and the clinical staff, but also to patients themselves. It also means that startup groups can have the same access as large corporations to virtually limitless computing power and storage capability, enabling synchronous development of many applications to benefit patients from federated, secure datasets,” he said.
