Covid-19 Update
How cloud-computing is facilitating the global response to Covid-19 the WHO, Imperial College London, Genomics England, Moderna, and UC San Diego Health are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud technology to help. Cloud computing supports these organisations by providing technology needed to measure COVID-19’s spread, to test citizens, monitor its impact, decode immune system responses, develop therapeutics, distribute and manage vaccine rollouts, and many other critical functions.
By Jens Dommel, Head of Healthcare, EMEA, Amazon Web Services
During this unprecedented COVID-19 global pandemic, cloud computing has played an important role in healthcare’s response to the disease. The impact of COVID-19 on healthcare professionals began with a surge of new patients in need of urgent care. But new and unforeseen challenges arose as the crisis unfolded. For example, social distancing restrictions had to be navigated to keep everybody as safe as possible. The crisis led to the rapid proliferation of new research on vaccines and therapeutics, which needed to be analysed and understood for life-saving value. We have also seen a surge in misinformation, leading to new demands for accurate information from healthcare professionals. These factors have squeezed the sector’s time, resources and personnel on all sides, which has accelerated the demand for innovative digital solutions. Around the world, healthcare organisations including
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Supporting researchers Healthcare professionals have faced a tidal wave of information about the virus. In fact, more than 300,000 medical research articles were published on the topic of COVID-19 treatment between December 2019 and May 2020. To tackle this ‘infodemic’, a team at Imperial College London has created a global knowledge platform called REDASA (REaltime Data Analysis and Synthesis) <https://www.pansurg.org/redasa>. The platform combines artificial intelligence with human expertise to help the healthcare community quickly make sense of this tidal wave of information, ultimately finding better treatments for COVID-19 and saving clinicians tens of thousands of hours. Vaccine rollout Many of us will be focused on when we can receive our COVID-19 vaccinations, and the cloud has proven to be an invaluable tool in supporting the development and rollout of these vaccines. Developing, managing, and distributing a vaccine that can fight a global pandemic requires innovation
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and modernized IT systems to ensure doses get to patients quickly and efficiently. In vaccine development, Moderna’s scientists are using AWS to compress the time needed to advance drug candidates to clinical studies; increase the agility of its research, development, and manufacturing processes; and achieve results – such as personalized cancer vaccines – that would have been impossible even a few years ago. Patient care In patient care, there has been a boom in outpatient video consultations as digital platforms make it easier, safer and quicker and more convenient for patients to speak with practitioners. In the UK for example, video consultation provider Attend Anywhere enabled tens of thousands of individuals to virtually see their clinicians in just a few months at the start of the crisis last year, and many more on an ongoing basis since then as trusts adopt video as a standard option provided to patients. And in the United Arab Emirates, Germany and the UK, Huma’s Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) solution is helping to manage patients diagnosed with COVID-19 by tracking symptoms, monitoring vital signs and any deterioration, and can also automatically flag high-risk patients. This shift to digital platforms is expected to outlast the crisis and provide long-term benefits to patients and practitioners alike. AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative With participation from 35 global research institutions, start-ups and businesses, last
