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Asia shows readiness to harness cloud technology for healthcare
Dr Rowland Illing, Director & Chief Medical Officer, International Public Sector Health, Amazon Web Services, speaking with reporters. Photo from AWS
ASIA PACIFIC
Hospital visits, especially to a new doctor, usually require a patient to bring and sign a lot of paperwork. There is the repetitive process of filling out multiple forms with one’s basic information, and even specialised forms for one’s previous health assessment. The only thing more tedious than filling out all the forms? The long lines. The anxious waiting. The dreaded possibility that one would be made to come back and do everything all over again because of missing paperwork or the need for new tests.
For Amazon Web Services (AWS) Chief Medical Officer Rowland Illing, cloud technology is imperative in making healthcare products and services more affordable and accessible at a huge scale.
“We’re at the tipping point where patient care can be positively impacted by the power of cloud technology. The impact is allowing the democratisation of access to data, to computing power, and to services. Through those different aspects, AWS is really enabling the digitisation and utilisation of healthcare data,” AWS’s Illing explained in an interview with Healthcare Asia.
The AWS executive added that he sees a bright spot in the Asia Pacific region, citing India’s GI Cloud Initiative (Meghraj) and Australia’s Cloud Procurement policy as signs of greater adoption to come.
“In India we’ve seen a massive adoption of cloud technology on behalf of the government. The telemedicine platform that was built during COVID was built by the government and the national health system on AWS, called eSanjeevani. And that scaled up to deliver telemedicine services for the whole of India, now 1.4 billion people have access to the platform,” Illing said.
But different APAC countries will adopt cloud technology at different paces.
“I think the level of cloud maturity differs in different countries, and we ran different studies with several governments in Asia Pacific, with the idea to understand the barriers to cloud adoption and how we can make it go faster… more mature countries have cloud policies in place,” Illing said.
Key to cloud adoption
Government policies are key to the fast adoption of cloud technology, Illing said, citing the need for separate policies for delivering cloud services safely, procuring cloud, and having new government services be on the cloud as soon as it starts.
Education is key to helping people understand cloud technology, as there are several common misconceptions about it. Some issues about adoption, Illing said, might not even be issues at all.
“It gets talked about a lot, but data privacy is not only possible [on the cloud], it is also preferred. [Our partners] want to move to the cloud because of data privacy,” he said. He explained that AWS gives its partner healthcare providers granular access controls, making it easy for them to set up specifics on who has access to what data, when, where, and how. It has application program interfaces (APIs) for data encryption and protection.
To help bridge this knowledge gap, AWS has set a goal to train 29 million people by 2025 in cloud technology and how to deliver such services. Training has already started in the Asia-Pacific region.
For example, how can cloud technology help those from developing countries who have no access to modern technology? Illing explained that it’s not a matter of having the patients themselves connect to the cloud. The help comes more from how their healthcare providers have access to not just their data on the cloud, but also to the means to make sense of such data.
“There is an enormous challenge of coping with the vast amount of data available.
When we go to the individual patient level, there’s always been a limitation to access to data even before cloud came to the equation.”
But a patient need not have access to the internet to benefit from cloud technology. AWS partner WelTel has delivered its services to HIV-positive patients in Rwanda and indigenous communities in Canada and New Zealand through text messaging. The cloud technology is on the back end, allowing WelTel caregivers to better manage their processes so they know when and how to send these text messages to their customers.
