The Amazon Web Services Summit in Washington, D.C. brought together many public sector organizations, including healthcare companies, to share use cases across AWS products.
This multi-sector collaboration, a top AWS executive told Fierce Healthcare, can be valuable for healthcare stakeholders.
Among the public sector organizations that attended the Summit were organizations in government, healthcare, law, education and aerospace. Key topics discussed during the Summit were security, privacy, data utilization and generative AI.
“The healthcare organizations I've been able to talk to since being here at DC Summit are really excited about the opportunity to meet with other public sector industries and organizations,” said Angela Shippy, senior physician executive and clinical innovation lead of the global healthcare and nonprofit team at AWS.
"Healthcare organizations meeting with government organizations, meeting with nonprofit organizations, because they're all heavily regulated, they're mission-oriented. And so being in the same room and seeing, even though their individual problem might be a little bit different, the solutions that might get them to where they want to be next are similar," she said.
Mike Cannady, global director of partner programs and strategic initiatives for the public sector at AWS, said the needs of public sector organizations are often shared.
“Public sector organizations face several challenges, such as optimizing resources and adapting to changing needs,” Cannady said on a panel.
Shippy said healthcare organizations and other public sector organizations have had conversations about security during the Summit.
“One customer in particular said, being able to listen to government agencies who also have information that they need to keep secure … allows me to have a better understanding of how I can feel comfortable with protected health information in the Cloud as well,” Shippy said.
Tom Herzog, chief operating officer at Netsmart, a health information technology provider, said Netsmart’s partnership with AWS has enabled the company to innovate and better serve healthcare customers.
“The reality is we're moving so fast, we can't do that on our own. We have to have partners like AWS, and we have to have clients coming together, working to make a difference,” Herzog said.
Cannady also said that the majority of Amazon Bedrock customers, which number in the tens of thousands, are using more than one artificial intelligence and machine learning model and want a solution that supports using multiple models.
“What we're hearing from most customers is that they don't want to use just one model, they want to use multiple models, and that's been a key tenet of our strategy with our generative AI services,” Cannady said.
Shippy said digital transformation and cloud technology are key to improving the healthcare system and the patient care experience. “That's really what we do here at AWS Healthcare, we're allowing, on a large scale, a reimagining of how care is delivered. And so that's what I'm super excited about,” she said.