AWS, with a 16-year history in South Africa, has reiterated its commitment to supporting South African healthcare across research, education, innovation and national healthcare development.
This emerged during an AWS webinar on innovation-enhanced service delivery in the health sector, hosted in partnership with ITWeb.
Shez Partovi, MD, Worldwide Lead: Healthcare, Life Sciences & Genomics at Amazon Web Services, outlined AWS’s commitment to South Africa and to South African healthcare, noting the company had been in South Africa since 2004, launching the first AWS region in Africa in the country in April this year. Amazon now employs around 7 000 staff in the country.
He noted that AWS, rated by Gartner as the cloud leader 10 years in a row, now had a dedicated healthcare life sciences practice comprising an expert global team in every geography. “When you are in the healthcare and life sciences industry and you work with our team, you never have to explain your business to us because we’ve all been in the field,” he said.
“Three main things our customers are asking us to help with now are basically to transform their organisations’ underlying infrastructure, to help predict disease, and to personalise the health journey of patients using digital experiences, precision diagnosis and precision therapy.”
AWS had been supporting South African public and private sector efforts across these healthcare fronts and more, he said.
AWS underpins services such as RecoMed, South Africa’s largest online healthcare booking platform that connects over 150 000 patients and 2 000 healthcare providers every month; and Jembi, which leverages AWS Training to Improve Healthcare Information Exchange in Africa.
He highlighted the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI) provides support for innovation in rapid and accurate patient testing for 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and other diagnostic solutions to mitigate future outbreaks. “We’ve seen projects that in the past would have taken months or years take days or weeks, to deliver healthcare and accelerate citizen services,” he said.
AWS is hosting a series of webinars in South Africa to highlight the transformational power of its cloud technology. The next event, entitled: Opening engagement for a connected government and citizenry, will be staged on 22 October. For more information and to register for this event, go to https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/opening-engagement-for-a-connected-government-and-citizenry/index.html
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