Although the COVID-19 pandemic is starting to wane, the healthcare industry is not likely to lose focus any time soon, given the consequences of the crisis on a global scale. Against this backdrop, Amazon Web Services Inc. is committed to continued innovation in healthcare.

Following the Diagnostic Development Initiative, which encouraged organizations to apply the power of the cloud to accelerate COVID-19 diagnostic research and development, AWS is launching a new global program to help customers create solutions with the aim of making the healthcare system more equitable and sustainable.

It is a three-year, $40 million program open to vendors who want to innovate around three topics: Increasing access to health services for underserved communities, addressing social determinants of health, and leveraging data to promote more equitable and inclusive systems of care. Applications for the first year are open until November 15th.

“The pandemic, it was hard, it was traumatic in a lot of different ways. It also turned into this little innovation laboratory,” said Max Peterson (pictured), vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS. “But one of the things that it laid bare more than anything else were the inequities associated with some of these systems that had to spring into action.”

Peterson spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. They discussed some AWS announcements for the public sector, how national and local governments have modernized in the last 18 months, as well as technology trends to watch out for, especially after the pandemic. (* Disclosure below.)

Unemployment benefit systems in the cloud

The AWS cloud has allowed national and local governments to modernize their structures in several areas beyond healthcare. With the unemployment rate rising dramatically as a consequence of the pandemic, governments relied on the speed and scale of the cloud to quickly put unemployment benefit systems into action, for example.

“We worked with the U.S. Small Business Administration, 15 other states across the U.S. to have those systems in place in weeks to be able to serve the unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Peterson explained.

The public sector also relied on the cloud to be able to respond to citizens’ demands enabling government agents to work remotely from home.

“We had states across the country standing up call centers on Amazon Connect, [and] instantly, they could have a high scalable volume call center that was situated for their instantly remote workforce, as opposed to their old call center technology,” Peterson highlighted.

The AWS-governments partnership has also spread outside the United States: more than 26 national governments run their vaccine management scheduling systems on AWS. The biggest management carried out so far has been in India, where in a single day the vaccine system scheduled and conducted 22.5 million vaccinations, according to Peterson.

“People have talked about private-public partnerships for a long time, [and] I’m really proud of some of the work that Amazon and the whole team are doing around the world in those types of public-private partnerships,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit Washington, DC. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE