The cloud brings to healthcare unprecedented opportunities for global collaboration, innovation scale and service delivery, allowing the sector to dramatically enhance outcomes, says AWS.

Speaking ahead of an AWS webinar on "Innovation-enhanced service delivery in the health sector", Zubin Chagpar: Head of MEA, AWS Public Sector Sales, says providing access to scalable, dependable and highly secure computing power is transforming citizen services, including healthcare.

AWS has long collaborated with healthcare providers, public health organisations, government agencies and life science businesses around the globe to enable healthcare and life sciences progress, and – most recently – to support their efforts to cope with the ripple effect of COVID-19.

Chagpar says the cloud supports healthcare modernisation across every part of the healthcare value chain – from service providers and medical aids, to pharma and biotech, research and diagnostics.

“The very nature of our business – enabling organisations to access scalable, dependable and highly secure computing power – has meant we are naturally playing an important role in the response to COVID-19, both at a global and local level here in South Africa. It’s a responsibility to our customers, and the wider community, which we take very seriously,” Chagpar says.

AWS sees significant opportunities for the healthcare sector in South Africa and pan-Africa to drive further innovation and progress on the back of cloud technologies – and there are indications that sector stakeholders are keen to further their cloud journey.

Commenting on the recent AWS and ITWeb Cloud Survey findings, AWS notes that respondents in the healthcare sector said they were using the cloud or planning to move to cloud in the next six to 12 months, and that key drivers for this 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.

The AWS webinar on innovation-enhanced service delivery in the health sector will be held on 22 September, exploring how the progress in achieving South Africa’s national health goals can be enhanced by improving government capacity to interact with the private sector in areas such as procurement, contracting and performance management. To register, click here.