Johannesburg, 13 Dec 2021
The cloud is changing the way businesses and industries operate, creating efficiencies and, more importantly, opening up new paths of innovation. In no other industry is the cloud’s potential more evident than in healthcare, says Jean-Pierre Horne, Head of Healthcare at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in South Africa.
Based on the findings of the AWS and IT Web Cloud Survey, it’s clear that the South African healthcare industry agrees. Healthcare respondents said they were already using the cloud or planning to move to it in the six to 12 month period. Key drivers identified included making storage accessible from anywhere, duplicating hard drives, making services available to the public, and achieving easily accessible information across departments and staff components.
“Cloud services like AWS for Health are helping reinvent the way healthcare organisations collaborate, and our government has certainly bought into the potential of digital healthcare technologies to improve the quality of and access to healthcare,” he says. “But we have to be clear that technology is no silver bullet. The true benefits of digital healthcare will only accrue when the technology becomes integrated into the way in which we provide healthcare, and how the public manages its individual healthcare outcomes.
“IT does not determine the trajectory of healthcare but rather supports the healthcare ecosystem” says Horne. In the South African public health context, the rapid development and deployment of the Electronic Vaccination Data System (EVDS) in just three weeks has shown just what can be achieved when the public and private sectors collaborate. For this to work, though, it is critical that a body of standards exists to ensure interoperability between various systems and to enable the seamless transfer of data.
“In the end, digital healthcare requires the free flow of data between the different parts of the healthcare ecosystem,” Horne observes. “This is essential in providing the kind of patient-centric experience we want to give, but also in supporting data-driven clinical and operational decisions, as well as improved research and collaboration across the ecosystem.”
The Department of Health is busy developing a comprehensive set of standards for the proposed National Health Insurance Information Management System. This common standard will enable systems interoperability and the free flow of data, while also ensuring a uniform governance framework.
Critical importance of security Data privacy and security are key issues in healthcare given the sensitivity of the patient data it holds. Security has to be top of mind for providers— in a very real sense, security (and thus trust) will be one of the key success factors in realising the potential of digital healthcare.
The extent of the problem can be seen in the shocking statistic that over 93% of healthcare organisations have suffered a data breach of some kind in the past five years.
“Security is job zero for AWS for Health,” notes Horne. Globally, AWS has more than 50 compliance certifications and accreditations, and it provides clients with encryption at scale, with keys managed either by its in-house Key Management Service or by the individual client.
“The key principle for us is that clients own their own data, and they control who accesses it and how, across the entire data lifecycle,” he says. “Of course, with data of this nature, data sovereignty is a key consideration and so the opening of our datacentre in Cape Town is a major indicator of our belief in South Africa—clients can specify that their data has to stay within the region.”
One of the key benefits of the cloud is the speed with which it enables healthcare solutions to be developed and brought to market. AWS for Health aims to play a growing role in the sector by providing a suite of comprehensive, purpose-built health services and solutions, backed up by a network of trusted business partners.
These healthcare solutions offer a way for any member of the healthcare ecosystem to access tried-and-tested solutions `off the shelf’ to achieve strategic objectives. The AWS for Health Solutions Offering covers the whole healthcare lifecycle. It includes infrastructure on AWS; data lakes for the storage, protection and optimisation of healthcare data; analytics and artificial intelligence/machine learning; digital front door solutions to ensure a seamless patient experience; digital therapeutics; and personalised care.
In particular, AWS for Health can be leveraged by public-sector healthcare entities to implement digital healthcare strategies with minimal investment and rapid rollout. For example, the Amazon HealthLake will automatically extract meaningful medical information from raw data, revolutionising a traditionally manual, error-prone and costly process. The derived insights can then be used to unlock novel insights to improve care and reduce costs. By using FHIR work on AWS Healthcare Interoperability Resources standards, it becomes easy to exchange information across multiple applications very securely.
An AWS Customer, Right ePharmacy uses AWS to deliver last mile medicine dispending across Sub-Sahara Africa using mobile, smart collect-andgo lockers and Pharmacy Dispensing Units (PDU). Another AWS customer, CareConnect HIE NPC has create South Africa’s first private healthcare Health Information Exchange (HIE) allowing public healthcare providers and payers to share health patient health records amongst themselves to provide more patient centric care across these providers.
“AWS for Health provides the foundations on which partners in both the public and private sectors can rapidly create and deploy services in line with their overall strategies,” Horne concludes. “Because it shares the same foundations of security and standards, the whole ecosystem can innovate more quickly and collaborate more effectively to serve patients better – which is our common goal.”
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