Within the chaos of COVID-19 lies an opportunity for healthcare to evolve, to improve its digital toolset, and uplevel its ability to serve the population. Naturally, COVID-19 is pushing healthcare to adopt the public cloud even faster than it already was. Cloudticity was recently recognized by Amazon Web Services for Best Solution Delivering COVID-19 Value for the project we did with the the state of New York.
Flashback: March 2020, COVID Breaks in New York
When COVID broke in the United States, New York was one of the first and hardest hit states with more than 52,000 cases by late March. With little information on the novel virus, and much less on how to respond, the state needed a solution to help it tap into its clinical reserves and swiftly aggregate historic data on COVID-19 patients for analysis.
The state turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and partner, Cloudticity, to help.
In a recent webinar highlighting this project, Jason MacNamara, Health Lead at AWS, and Jim Kirkwood, Director of Healthcare Innovation at New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH), discussed how the state of New York leveraged AWS-native services and Cloudticity Healthcare DataHub to unlock COVID-19 data insights, improve response, and get the state on track to recovery.
Case Study: New York State Department of Health
The New York State Department of Health (NYS DOH) was receiving CSV files from six different HIEs, referred to as “Qualified Entities” in the state of New York. Overwhelmed by CSVs, they needed a more automated approach to integrate, consolidate, and transform clinical data on COVID-19 patients so they could perform meaningful analysis.
The department needed to aggregate COVID-19 clinical data in order to understand:
- Admissions/discharges and frequency of hospitalization
- Comorbidities, symptoms, and links to clinical history for patient trends
- What individuals or populations are most at risk in real time
- Perform contact tracing
“The department worked with AWS and they identified a great partner in Cloudticity who helped build out a data lake essentially in eleven days before clinical information was coming in. So this was, I think, the fastest project I’ve ever worked on,” said Kirkwood.
As a result, the department is now able to:
- Process data within five minutes of delivery
- Accurately report on comorbidities, symptoms, swells, length of hospitalization, and outcomes
- Manage ventilator inventories and hospital capacity using Machine Learning models
- Provide relevant surveillance to hospitals and government agencies to drive response activities in real time
- Push positive cases to contact tracing mechanism
At the time of this writing, New York state is “in the green” and on track to recovery, thanks to the AWS-native solution.
Best Solution Delivering COVID-19 Value in AWS Public Sector Partners Awards 2020
AWS recently recognized Cloudticity for Best Solution Delivering COVID-19 Value in the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards 2020, with distribution partner CarahSoft, for the implementation detailed above.
Although we are devastated by the state of the world, we are honored to have developed a solution that is really making a difference. To know that, when healthcare needs us most, we can stand by our mission.
Yes, COVID-19 has been a tragedy for healthcare. But it’s also presented an opportunity for growth. It’s forced healthcare to address critical gaps, replace antiquated systems, and uplevel its digital infrastructure. As a result, healthcare will be better equipped to serve the population during this pandemic and every incident, big and small, afterward.
