Amazon puts $100m into global health drive
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has committed $100 million in AI and cloud technology capacity to support the building of health services for "underserved communities."
The five-year Health Impact Initiative (HII) will tap into AWS' expertise in generative AI, which the company said is "accelerating the development and scale of diagnostics, streamlining clinical workflows, and unlocking insights from massive datasets."
HII will try to make sure that communities with the most need for the technology – and for whom AI can sometimes be out of reach – now have a route to access. It is spreading its net widely as it looks for projects to support, with health non-profits, government agencies, research institutions, industry, and technology companies all encouraged to apply.
The initiative is focusing initially on three areas or 'domains' where AWS believes there is the greatest potential to close health gaps, namely expanding access to health services, advancing women's and children's health, and tackling malnutrition.
"Agents and AI are revolutionising health services, but these transformative technologies too often don't reach the communities that need them most unless organisations know how to access and deploy them," said Dr Rowland Illing, chief medical officer and director, healthcare and life sciences, at AWS.
"The AWS Health Impact Initiative helps organisations that support those communities to build with AI and extends our commitment to democratise AI and cloud-powered health innovations that benefit everyone, everywhere," he added.
The access domain is looking for projects that can improve and strengthen community health services, particularly those in rural and remote areas, low- and middle-income countries, and communities disproportionately affected by disease. AI and cloud computing can help in areas like supporting outpatient care and research, and building and scaling diagnostic workflows.
In women and child health, AWS is envisaging projects that support inclusive research, more balanced health data, and innovation in health technology, pointing out that only 5% of health research funding addresses women's health, and up to half of medicines given to children lack paediatric clinical validation.
Finally, faced with surging levels of malnutrition around the world – particularly among pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, and adolescent girls – the aim is to back projects that can improve food distribution, predict food security patterns, and expand access to healthy food.
Earlier initiatives by AWS include the Health Equity Initiative, first announced in 2021, which pledged $60 million over three years to accelerate research and innovation that could plug gaps in healthcare for global populations through digital health and data projects.
