Amazon Web Services worked with customers and partners across Latin America, Canada and the Caribbean to develop and test AWS Industry Quest: Healthcare and to teach them to build cloud solutions that can benefit healthcare and meet health IT's need for trained cloud talent.

WHY IT MATTERS

AWS said it created the immersive cloud training program as part of its 2020 pledge to provide free cloud computing skills training to 29 million people worldwide in a blog announcement about the launch last week.

Solutions architects, engineers and business analysts and decision makers with technical proficiency on AWS can work with a number of AWS services in a simulated hospital in a live AWS Console environment. 

The 30 assignments or lessons delivered in a gamified fashion include monitoring, alerting and remediating of noncompliant HIPAA findings, deriving artificial intelligence and machine learning insights from data, achieving healthcare interoperability, simplifying and automating prior authorization forms, and more. The program's key performance indicators include overall patient satisfaction, medical equipment utilization, average patient wait time and more. 

Players or learners can unlock new hospital equipment and furniture, like magnetic resonance imaging machines, X-ray machines, seats in the waiting area and more.

Rhonda Bosch, senior vice president of customer success at AlayaCare, a Canada-based cloud-based platform for home health and infusion services, said in the blog post that it is working with AWS on Industry Quest training for healthcare to provide more options for customer training.

AlayaCare and Hospital Sirio Libanes in Brazil participated in beta testing, AWS said.

"AlayaCare’s expertise in providing cloud-native, patient-centric home care systems and the feedback provided were valuable in creating this interactive solution,” Bryant Condie, the director of digital learning for AWS Training and Certification, added. 

THE LARGER TREND

Clinician burnout in a post-pandemic world is another healthcare challenge that AWS has proposed cloud technology to be a cure for.

In March, AWS announced 23 startups selected for a new AWS Healthcare Accelerator focused on developing cloud-based solutions to help address the global healthcare worker shortage.

Many of those startups have been helping providers to reduce individual workloads by removing friction in day-to-day processes, streamlining clinical workflows, reducing documentation burden, outsourcing tasks, securing information exchange and developing remote monitoring, patient engagement, mobile health workforce and training programs, Dr. Rowland Illing, chief medical officer and director of International Public Sector Health & the Global Healthcare Venture Capital and Startups team for AWS, said. 

"We believe global collaboration between healthcare organizations and technology providers can improve provider and patient experience as well as patient outcomes," Jeff Kratz, AWS general manager, Worldwide Public Sector Partners, told Healthcare IT News in November when the AWS healthcare workforce cohort opportunity was announced.

ON THE RECORD

"From improving diagnosis to democratizing access to care to closing the health equity gap, cloud adoption presents many opportunities for healthcare organizations," said John Davies, general manager of AWS Public Sector Latin America, Canada and the Caribbean. 

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.