Scale and Transform Telehealth and Virtual Care in the CloudCloud innovations to meet evolving patient and clinical needs—during COVID-19 and beyond

Notes

This document is provided for informational purposes only. It represents Amazon Web

Services’ (AWS) current product offerings and practices as of the date of issue of this

document, which are subject to change without notice. Customers are responsible for

making their own independent assessment of the information in this document and any

use of AWS’s products or services, each of which is provided “as is” without warranty of

any kind, whether express or implied. This document does not create any warranties,

representations, contractual commitments, conditions, or assurances from AWS, its

affiliates, suppliers, or licensors. The responsibilities and liabilities of AWS to its customers

are controlled by AWS agreements, and this document is not part of, nor does it modify,

any agreement between AWS and its customers.

Table of contents

Section 1

Introduction

Section 2

COVID-19: Learn from experience and create new opportunities

Section 3

Key considerations for implementing telehealth solutions

Section 4

Additional resources: Partners and tools

Section 5

Start your journey

04

07

12

19

21

Section 1: Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fundamental importance of having a strong, well-

funded, and agile healthcare system in all countries. In addition to managing unanticipated

coronavirus requirements, healthcare providers are learning how to maintain normal

operating procedures during a crisis—so patients can receive essential care, economic

activity can move forward, and governments can become more resilient in the event of

future health emergencies.

COVID-19 presented six main challenges for healthcare providers globally

In 2020, the COVID-19 crisis challenged healthcare systems. However, it also presented

new opportunities to experiment and solve long-standing industry challenges with

technology.

Healthcare providers faced six main challenges in addressing healthcare needs of large

populations, during and because of the COVID-19 crisis. They needed to figure out how to:

Meeting evolving patient and clinical needs—during COVID-19 and beyond

Manage a significant increase in acutely ill patients

Provide non-COVID-19 related outpatient and inpatient care in clinical settings -

without exposing patients to the virus

Meet unprecedented citizen demands for health advice - and instill

confidence in people reluctant to access care because they’re worried about

COVID-19 transmission

Help clinicians and staff avoid infection - particularly amidst constraints such as

personal protection equipment (PPE) and workforce shortages

Work in an agile way to account for rapidly changing public health policies

Share information securely and efficiently to enable well-rounded care and to

understand more about the virus

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2

3

4

5

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Telehealth solutions have played an essential role in helping overcome these challenges.

From virtual appointment capabilities and virtual call centers to secure information portals

and data analytics tools—providers have innovated quickly to address these issues. Also,

in many countries, changes in regulation and billions of dollars in temporary government

funding enabled clinicians to leverage telehealth solutions. This additional funding led to

rapid innovation and adoption, changing consumer expectations forever.

As the response to COVID-19 evolves over time, healthcare providers and patients have

experienced a variety of benefits—and they now consider telehealth to be part of a

holistic, always-on care system. By adopting the fundamental building blocks and features

of well-designed telehealth solutions, providers can deliver 24/7 access to personalized,

cost-effective, one-on-one care—wherever patients are, and whatever the public health

system’s constraints.

Consider a patient with a new or existing health condition. They might need to go to the

doctor or hospital for a critical, in-person health check. However, there are also situations

where they have a simple question, are worried about a symptom, or want reassurance.

In these cases, where there is an all-too-familiar drain on limited provider budgets and

schedules, an in-person visit isn’t essential. But a phone conversation with a healthcare

professional might not be enough. This is exactly where a live video consultation has the

potential to solve the patient’s issue more conveniently and it might be the safest option

during a pandemic.) In this scenario, virtual care improves the patient’s access to care and

their satisfaction. It also improves the cost-effectiveness of care delivery and, with effective

triaging in place, gives the clinician more flexibility in how care is administered.

“I never thought speaking to my specialist via phone was going to work, but it was

very easy and much more convenient than driving into a clinic and waiting. I can see

myself doing this more often and coming into the office for in-person visits only when

it’s necessary.”

- First-time telehealth user

How COVID changed the telehealth world | The BriefIn the latest episode of The Brief, we share how telehealth, powered by the cloud, is

helping customers meet evolving patient and clinical needs in a modern world.

Listen now

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From nice-to-have to essential: Telehealth’s response to the pandemic

What was once an aspirational goal has become commonplace within a matter of weeks.

This set the stage for providers and patients to deliver and receive virtual care quickly using

the cloud.

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet with pay-

as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and

servers, you can access technology services—such as computing power, storage, and

databases—on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The cloud gives you access to a broad range of technologies so you can innovate faster

and build nearly anything that you can imagine. Unlike typical IT systems that supported

telehealth and virtual care a decade ago, the cloud lets any IT team (big or small) deploy

new systems quickly, securely, and cost-effectively. Projects like telehealth that would

have taken months or years with legacy infrastructure can now be implemented in weeks.

This gives you the freedom to experiment and to test new ideas to differentiate patient

experiences and improve efficiency.

The adoption of telehealth in the cloud has supported clinicians by expanding access,

reducing costs, and improving clinical and operational efficiencies. At the same time, it’s

also helping to deliver a better patient experience by meeting patient needs in and outside

healthcare facilities, resulting in improved outcomes during a health crisis and beyond.

In this eBook, we’ll explore telehealth and virtual care solutions in detail, with relevant

cases from all over the world. We’ll look at the benefits for providers, patients, and

clinicians, as well as key implementation considerations and how the AWS Cloud addresses

them. This gives you a springboard for how your own organization can move forward and

deliver a better, more efficient, and holistic approach to healthcare—one that makes a real

difference to patients wherever they are in their journey.

Consumer adoption of telehealth has skyrocketed, from 11% of US

consumers in 2019 to 46% of consumers now. They’re currently using it

to replace canceled healthcare visits, but 76% of consumers said they’re

interested in continuing to use it going forward. (Source: McKinsey COVID-19 Consumer Survey, April 27, 2020)

52% of physicians say telemedicine has the most potential to transform

the healthcare sector in the next five years. (Source: Stanford Medicine 2020 Health Trends Report)

46%

52%

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Section 2

Learn from experience and create new opportunities

COVID-19 is the catalyst for accelerating telehealth and virtual care implementation

worldwide. Initiatives that had been part of medium-term strategic plans suddenly needed

to roll out in weeks—and at scale.

Between the start of the pandemic and April 20, 2020, more than 4.3 million health

and medical services were delivered to more than 3 million patients through telehealth

introduced by the Australian government. In the US, according to a Journal of the American

Informatics Association study, urgent virtual care visits at NYU Langone Medical Center

grew by 683% and non-urgent virtual care visits grew by a staggering 4,345% between

March 2 and April 14, 2020. AWS customer MedStar Health saw daily telehealth visits jump

from two a day to 4,150 in just two months. And another AWS user, Bluestream Health,

supported 100,000 virtual visits between March 13 and May 1, 2020.

This data indicates a strong appetite for receiving virtual care on the part of patients and

delivering it on the part of clinicians. As Michael Barnett MD, Assistant Professor, Harvard

T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said, “I don’t think we can put the genie back in

the bottle.”

increase in non-urgent virtual

care visits since COVID-19

4,345%

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The rapid transition of non-urgent care to video-based medical appointments has largely

worked. Clinician doubts on the feasibility of delivering quality care to patients in real time

have mostly been eased. And telehealth has proven to be a viable solution for driving

clinical efficiencies and patient satisfaction. However, the right mode—for pandemic

management and beyond—differs for each setting and provider.

There are many solutions available, from secure video conferencing to data analytics tools.

Unique provider circumstances vary in terms of COVID-19 patients, non-coronavirus care,

staff health and safety, operational models, and collaboration with other stakeholders.

There’s no one-size-fits-all model to implement.

Triaging is a prime example. What model should be in place for deciding which patients

receive virtual appointments? Video consultations need to be backed up by a robust pre-

screening and information review process to ensure virtual appointments are right for their

concern. Cloud-based solutions can enable this in many ways, from powering virtual call

centers to providing a secure portal for viewing comprehensive patient histories.

Another example relates to remote patient monitoring. Whether it’s managing COVID-19

symptoms or tracking long-term health conditions, easy-to-deploy apps and patient

portals allow clinicians to track treatment process and symptom status in near real time, so

they can respond proactively and pre-empt potential admissions down the line.

Here are four key lessons from the COVID-19 experience of deploying and scaling telehealth solutions:

Lesson #1: There’s no one-size-fits-all virtual care model

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Traditional New Models

ReactiveEpisodic

CentralizedPatient-initiated

Disconnected servicesDoctor-led

ProactiveContinuousDistributed and networkedPatient and auto-initiatedIntegrated pathwaysMultidisciplinaryEducation and empowerment

Single systemLimited mobile facilities

Telephone-basedMinimal automation

Multiple integrated platforms and appsWide range of mobile optionsMultichannelMany automated servicesHome monitoringSelf-help tools

Inconvenient and time-consuming

In-clinic and doctor-orientedFace-to-face, in-person

Difficult to access

At patient’s conveniencePatient-orientedRemote and in-person if requiredResponsive

The sickHigh health literacy

Upper socioeconomic cohortDigitally disadvantaged

Prevention and wellnessChronic diseaseEarly diagnosisThe digitally enabled

Operating model

Technology

Pa

tient experience

Optimized for

The COVID-19 experience shows the importance of testing and iterating a virtual care model,

scaling from one to many.

– Dr. Andrew Jones, Head of Clinical Innovations, AWS

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, patients and clinicians recognized the

unprecedented circumstances and were willing to overlook technical issues or journey

bottlenecks along the way. However, both patient and provider patience will erode over

time if telehealth technology issues persist.

Healthcare providers must therefore have an agile mindset when it comes to maintaining

and evolving telehealth and virtual care solutions. In addition, receiving and acting on

patient feedback is imperative. It helps you understand what is working and enables you to

improve on communication and care delivery. That way, you build an evolving, long-term

strategy that continuously listens to the communities you serve.

The need to iterate often and fail fast makes the cloud an ideal infrastructure choice

compared with buying IT hardware because it keeps the costs of experimenting low. With

the cloud, users can turn IT resources on or off as required, and providers only pay for IT

resources (like databases and video conferencing software) they use.

Lesson #2: Continuous improvement must be part of the strategy

Lesson #3: Data silos must be addressed

According to the Data Center Colocation Market 2020 Industry Report, the healthcare

industry is the fastest growing sector when it comes to data generation. At the same time,

it also has the pressure of reducing costs and delivering patient-focused, efficient, and

industry-compliant solutions. From electronic medical records (EMR) to medical equipment

digitalization and patient response system improvements—the sector is seeing increasing

amounts of data being generated. This structured data, along with unstructured data

(e.g. physician notes on notepads), is frequently stored in separate, unconnected locations.

This creates problems when clinicians are working remotely with less face-to-face

collaboration with colleagues.

Therefore, clinicians need access to telehealth and virtual care deployments that involve

simple, highly secure ways of storing data—ones that break down silos. They must be

an easy change for clinicians and providers to implement and maintain, and offer a

streamlined user experience. Stakeholders also need complete confidence that patient

health information (PHI) is protected and compliant with local regulations.

For example, AWS is designed to enable you to build applications that store, process, and

transmit sensitive PHI in a way that’s consistent with applicable compliance frameworks like

HIPAA, GDPR, PHIPA, and more. In the AWS Cloud, security is a shared responsibility. AWS

is responsible for the security and reliability of the underlying infrastructure, and customers

are responsible for security measures used to protect their applications. Customers choose

the region(s) in which their content is stored and then manage access. AWS doesn’t access

any content without the customer’s consent.

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Data lakes are just one tool provider IT teams can use to store all their data and manage

large volumes of unstructured data. Until they are ready to analyze, process, and synthesize

this data, it remains immutable, secure, and intact. Setting up a data lake takes hours

not weeks, and you remove the burden of multi-year data analytics projects that often

hinder initiatives like these. Providers, clinicians, and research teams can bring a range

of datasets together (like anonymized patient genomics data, research cohort data, and

medication reports) to create a data-based backbone for telehealth delivery. For example,

Amazon SageMaker can help extract insight from vast amounts of data, with little human

intervention, using a data lake. And Amazon QuickSight can query unstructured data,

detect trends, and help with data visualization, so findings are shareable across clinical,

operations, and other groups in a hospital.

Lesson #4: Real-time information sharing is essential in accelerating effective care

Effective pandemic management relies on real-time learning and data-driven collaboration

across sectors and between clinicians, governments, public health officials, and

researchers worldwide. Sharing plans, data, technical tools, and resources creates real-time

situational awareness for those on the front lines of treatment and policymaking. Data

acquired through and stored in virtual care solutions must be able to link into this wider

collaboration, so everyone can benefit from treatment advances.

One example is the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition, which brings together healthcare

organizations, technology firms including AWS, nonprofits, academia, and startups.

They use cloud-based solutions instead of IT hardware purchased by individual hospitals to

enable real-time learnings from patient data. Therefore, they can use a common

language and approach to scan for positive trends, federate results, and carry out large-

scale analytics.

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Section 3

Key considerations for implementing telehealth and virtual care solutions

When it comes to telehealth and virtual care, COVID-19 has highlighted the importance

of taking a tailored approach for your organization—while making sure secure patient

information is accessible on demand and systems enable collaboration.

What factors should you consider when developing a tailored telehealth approach?

Here are six key considerations.

Consideration #1: Patient health information security and patient privacy

Patient health information (PHI) must be stored securely

and in a way that complies with relevant requirements

such as HIPAA, GDPR, or PHIPA. An advantage of

established cloud-based solutions, like those built on

AWS, is that they’re designed to be compliant and to

protect data privacy. Generally, they also offer more

advanced security than on-premises data storage

solutions, which must be maintained and updated by

large IT teams and security experts.

Storing patient data in the cloud also has the advantage

of making that data more accessible, and automating

security tasks on AWS reduces human configuration

errors, which improves data security. PHI and other

sensitive data are also more durable in the cloud,

because AWS currently has 24 regions where providers

can back up data, including 77 availability zones

(discrete data centers with redundant power, networking,

connectivity) globally. This means data is harder to lose

and easier to restore during emergencies.

Lastly, cloud companies like AWS invest millions in

continually improving security. The AWS Cloud has

more than 500 continually improved features and

services focused on security and compliance. As a result,

providers can store, process, and transmit sensitive

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the US partners with AWS to provide cloud services to 17 agencies. They use the cloud to host secret and top secret classified information.

“Security is an absolutely existential need for everything we do at the agency. The cloud on its weakest day is more secure than a client service solution. Encryption runs seamlessly on multiple levels. It’s been nothing short of transformational.”

Sean Roche Associate Deputy Director,

Directorate of Digital Innovation,

Central Intelligence Agency

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health-related information in line with a variety of stringent, government-mandated

privacy obligations across an extensive global footprint, including North America, South

America, Europe, China, South Africa, and the Middle East. For example, AWS Cloud has

more than 100 HIPAA-eligible services for US users. We designed all Amazon European

services for GDPR compliance, and Canadian customers benefit from PHIPA compliance.

Consideration #2: Data interoperability betweenclinical systems

To deploy telehealth successfully, healthcare providers need

to share data and conduct confidential patient interactions

virtually in an interoperable way—that is, in a way that

allows different systems to exchange and make use of

information. This means they need data and technology that

can work across electronic records management, medication

management, home health solutions, and analytics and

reporting. For example, a physician should be able to email

a prescription from a medication management system

after a virtual consultation. Or data from a wearable device

should be able to integrate with patient health information

exchanges (HIEs) to inform monitoring and future treatment

requirements.

Globally, interoperability standards like the Fast Healthcare

Interoperability Resource (FHIR) enable health systems

to talk to each other, share data, and reveal new insights.

Implementing systems based on FHIR standards can ease

migration to a telehealth platform and enable richer data

analytics reporting.

of physicians say patient-generated data from wearables, apps, and sensors will be integrated with care delivery in the next 5–10 years

(Source: Deloitte 2020 Survey

of US Physicians)

83%

Consideration #3: Built-in scalability

Providers also need the ability to scale services in line with usage peaks and valleys as they

fluctuate, so they can respond in real time based on bed capacity, clinician bandwidth, and

patient demand. A cloud-based model of telehealth delivery becomes essential in enabling

this level of agility.

With the cloud, providers pay for telehealth and the supporting IT infrastructure as an

operating expenditure (Opex). They only pay for services used, on demand, with no need

to pre-order or maintain hardware. In the cloud, telehealth call capacity can easily fluctuate

from one to one million simultaneous users and more, because cloud IT resources can

automatically adjust as needed.

Click here to learn more about using open source FHIR APIs with FHIR Works on AWS

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This cloud-based delivery model also means providers don’t have to accurately predict

demand. Instead, they can start small and scale up as needed, paying only for the IT they

consume and actually use instead of provisioning hardware for maximum estimated peak

usage. Therefore, it’s simple to bring different IT services, locations, or regions on line as

needed—shifting quickly to implement changes based on people’s experiences—while

lowering costs and gaining operational and clinical efficiencies. Whether you want to

organize and track your cost and usage, enhance control through consolidated billing and

access permission, enable better planning through budgeting and forecasting, or further

lower cost with resources and pricing optimizations, you can leverage our services, tools,

and resources to help reduce your AWS bill, including keeping your spend in check with

custom budget threshold and auto alert notification with AWS Budgets.

Consideration #4: Patient experience and personalized care

Whether in-person or virtual, a positive patient experience is critical to the success of care

delivery. In an NEJM Catalyst Insights Council survey, over 91% of respondents agreed that

providing an excellent patient experience was an essential part of achieving high-quality

care. This is no different for virtual care. In fact, Accenture’s 2020 How COVID-19 will

permanently alter patient behavior study polled 2,700 patients around the world about

their preferences for receiving medical care since the COVID-19 pandemic.

of patients said telehealth care quality was at least as good as or

better than face-to-face visits

of patients using a new device or app rated their care experience

“good or excellent” and wanted to continue using them

of patients said their trust/belief in healthcare providers increased

as a result of COVID-19, driven by positive experiences with

telehealth technologies—which delivered quicker responses, more

convenient access to care, and a more personalized experience

97%

over90%

60%

Top findings were:

To achieve this level of success, telehealth deployment design should start by

understanding different patient populations and their care journeys, in addition to

identifying barriers to care and areas that would benefit from greater personalization. A by-

product of cloud-based telehealth is that it also opens up access to care for underserved

communities and non-urgent needs in the long term.

For example, the cloud offers automated translation and speech-to-text and text-to-speech

capabilities as a ready-to-use, on-demand service, with Amazon Alexa, Amazon Translate,

Amazon Lex, and Amazon Polly. Mount Sinai Health System in New York built a multilingual

chatbot using AWS that streamlined the patient experience and changed the way their

staff works.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York, MetroPlusHealth’, a wholly owned subsidiary

of NYC Health + Hospitals, the largest municipal health system in the United States, it identified

85,000 members who were at high risk for severe complications by using an algorithm that

flagged members for risk factors like asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

 

Dr. Amanda Parsons, MetroPlusHealth deputy chief medical officer, hoped to reach out to

these members to connect them not only with medical help but also with food, housing, and

emotional support if needed. But there was no way to reach such high volumes of people in

time to help them. “With our traditional member outreach, we can successfully reach about 50

people a day,” says Dr. Parsons. “So with 85,000 members, it would have taken us about 1,700

days, or a little over 4.5 years, to reach all of them. That’s a total of about 12,000 employee

hours.”

Understanding the patient journey provides a basis for evaluating different virtual care use

cases. You can then prioritize implementation based on the digital touchpoints that will

create opportunities for engagement, improve speed and quality of care delivery, and build

valuable trust. The right experience is patient-centric and simplified to eliminate barriers to

care, like mobile scheduling, up-front cost estimates, more convenient payment options,

and personalized communications throughout their journey.

When MetroPlusHealth launched the chatbot program, it reached 54,000 members over the

next 3 weeks, contacting as many as 10,000 people per day at its peak. Nine percent of these

members engaged with the chatbot, with half of them sharing at least one medical or social

need through the questionnaire. The chatbot was able to directly and instantly connect those

2,400 vulnerable people with the services they needed.

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The Telehealth Patient Journey

AwarenessLifestyle

Self-Service And Triaging

Tele-Consultation Primary Care

In-Hospital Diagnostics

Tele-Consultation Specialty Care

In-Hospital TreatmentDigital Therapy

Aged CareRemote Patient Monitoring

1Consumer engagement through outreach campaigns, e.g. for screening of high-risk population

3Virtual specialists visits for inpatient treatment, e.g. live proctoring by experts in any surgical environment

2Video consultation or live chat with primary care physician, e.g. on-demand or emergency visits

4Remote monitoring of vitals and secure data sharing with healthcare providers, e.g. blood sugar for diabetes

Consideration #5:Clinician workflow efficiency

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the importance of access to real-time

information and process efficiency. For the clinicians on the front lines of

coronavirus treatment, it became critical. For those trying to maintain care for

non-COVID-19 patients, standard workflows were upended when caregivers

had to work remotely in an effort to prevent virus transmission.

From the supply side, telehealth and virtual care solutions must fit into existing

workflows and deliver measurable efficiency gains to become widespread. For

instance, cloud-based communication tools can include functionality that shows

staff when a clinician is available—so it’s easy to schedule remote consultations

alongside other obligations. Video consultations can then be carried out on any

device (e.g. cell phone, desktop), making it easy for clinicians to build virtual care

into their schedules. Data management solutions can aggregate information

from across systems, so less time is spent trying to find notes, test results, and

prescriptions.

Amazon Transcribe Medical, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service,

makes it easy for developers to add medical speech-to-text capabilities to their

voice-enabled applications. The service is HIPAA-eligible, prioritizes patient

data privacy and security, and is driven by state-of-the-art machine learning

to accurately transcribe medical terminologies such as medicine names,

procedures, and even conditions or diseases. Amazon Transcribe Medical

can serve a diverse range of use cases, from transcribing physician-patient

conversations that enhance clinical documentation to subtitling telemedicine

consultations.

“I really felt like the AWS team members understood our business drivers—what we were

trying to do and what the technology needed to deliver,” she says. “And they didn’t tell us

what the technology should look like. Instead, they said, ‘What do you need it to do?’”

- Dr. Amanda Parsons, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, MetroPlusHealth

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Consideration #6: Care quality and patient outcome measurement

Measuring the efficacy of telehealth and virtual care solutions is key to continuous

improvement and ensuring patient and clinician engagement remains high.

A Massachusetts General Hospital study found that patients reported strong personal

connections with providers when using telehealth visits. An estimated 62% of patients said

the quality of telehealth visits was just as good as in-person visits; 21% said it was even

better.

“With a telehealth visit, 95% of the time spent by the patient is face-to-face with the doctor, compared to less than 20% of a traditional visit, in which most time is spent traveling and waiting,” said Lee Schwamm MD, Director, MGH Center for Telehealth. He

said the study confirmed that “what patients value most is uninterrupted time with their doctor.”

Metrics to monitor range from patient satisfaction and clinical efficiency gains to no-show

rates, admission/re-admission rates, and cost savings. Cloud-based analytics tools let you

measure this.

For example, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) is using the AWS Cloud to

expedite data processing, helping them advance better patient outcomes, decrease

hospitalizations, and reduce costs. BIDMC is working on projects to predict which patients

are likely to keep their scheduled office appointments and which are not. It will help them

reach out to patients who might miss appointments so that care can be delivered in a

timely manner, improving the patient experience and outcomes.

This project is being built using the Apache MXNet, a deep learning API that builds machine

learning applications, which use algorithms that automatically improve performance based

on experience. They can develop these models fast using Amazon SageMaker, a fully

managed service that enables high-quality model creation. AWS enables them to process

large data volumes quickly and gain valuable insight: the machine learning-based solutions

help predict no-shows and enable clinicians to work more proactively.

Machine learning and deep learning are both computer science fields derived from the

discipline of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the field of computer science

dedicated to solving cognitive problems commonly associated with human intelligence,

such as learning, problem solving, and pattern recognition. AWS offers the broadest and

deepest set of machine learning services and supporting cloud infrastructure, putting

machine learning in the hands of every developer, data scientist, and expert practitioner.

Named a leader in Gartner’s Cloud AI Developer Services’ Magic Quadrant, AWS is helping

tens of thousands of customers accelerate their machine learning journey.

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Section 4

Additional resources

The COVID-19 pandemic changed everyday life in healthcare. But companies

using AWS as their cloud platform are changing along with it—becoming

more agile, scalable, and innovative—to make life a little easier. While the

world spends more time at home, many companies are redefining how they

do business. And the ones using AWS are benefiting from the fastest pace of

innovation, the broadest and deepest functionality, the most secure computing

environment, and the performance needed to build what’s required for today

and tomorrow.

These additional resources will help you shape your organization’s telehealth

and virtual care journey.

Websites

• There’s Innovation in Numbers: AWS is how

• AWS Public Sector Healthcare: Unlock, connect, and transform data into actionable

insights that improve patient outcomes

• AWS Healthcare and Life Sciences: From benchtop to bedside, innovate faster to

improve patient outcomes and lower costs

• The healthcare startup team at AWS is working to more rapidly get relevant,

production-ready, clinically adopted solutions into the hands of healthcare providers

around the world. This site is an evolving effort to match inbound demand from global

healthcare organizations with best-in-breed partner solutions

• Innovate faster to improve patient outcomes. AWS Marketplace proactively addresses

the needs of today’s healthcare organizations— improving business outcomes and

helping to enhance the care they provide. Through a curated digital catalog of over

100 healthcare specific software solutions from independent software vendors,

AWS Marketplace can help healthcare organizations find the software they need to

innovate care and simplify procurement. Discover how healthcare organizations are

transforming patient care with AWS services and solutions in the Healthcare & Life

Sciences AWS Marketplace.

Videos

• What Is Cloud?: A three-minute video

• AWS Connected: Everyday life is changing a lot. But companies using AWS as their

cloud platform are changing right along with it—becoming more agile, scalable, and

innovative

• AWS for Innovation-driven Healthcare

• Embracing Remote Services: Best practices and lessons learned from COVID-19

• Technology for a Resilient Future: HUMA remote patient monitoring solution

• Leveraging Data and Technology to Realize the Full Promise of Virtual Care: FORCE

Therapeutics19

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

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TELEHEALTH SOLUTIONS KEY CONSIDERATIONS

COVID-19: LEARNINGS & OPPORTUNITIES

INTRODUCTION

Whitepapers

• Healthcare Data Interoperability: Creating a clearer view of patients

• Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services

• Accerlating Innovation in Healthcare

On-demand webinars

• How to Modernize Your Patient Experience with Amazon Connect

• Healthcare Data Interoperability with AWS Cloud

• Healthcare and Life Sciences Web Day 2020

Reports

• Discover what Public Cloud Looks Like in 2020: Gartner report

Glossary

What is telehealth?Telehealth is more of a broad solution that encompasses the entirety of remote and

technology-driven healthcare, focused on servicing patients at a distance. This might

refer to a doctor’s visit, monitoring a high-risk pregnancy, or managing a chronic condition

remotely. Telehealth technology can include telecommunications, video conferencing, or an

interactive voice response (IVR) system to gather and exchange information.

What is telemedicine?Telemedicine is a component of telehealth and is the practice of medicine using technology

to deliver care at a distance. A physician in one location uses a telecommunications

infrastructure to deliver care to a patient at a distant site. Telemedicine refers specifically to

remote clinical services, while telehealth can refer to remote non-clinical services. (Source)

What is virtual care?Virtual care can be defined as the ability to use technology to enable timely access to

healthcare services and support across disciplines provided by doctors, nurses, case

managers, etc. It’s often used synonymously with telehealth or telemedicine, which

indicates how integral virtual healthcare is to telehealth delivery. However, they are not

actually the same. Virtual healthcare is a component of telehealth that refers to real-time

“virtual visits” between patients and clinicians via communications technology (video and

audio) from practically any location.

eBooks

• Redefining Healthcare in the Cloud: Provider stories

• The Future of Healthcare in the Cloud: Precision medicine and medical research

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TELEHEALTH SOLUTIONS KEY CONSIDERATIONS

COVID-19: LEARNINGS & OPPORTUNITIES

INTRODUCTION

Section 5

Start your telehealth and virtual care journey with AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is collaborating with healthcare providers, public health

bodies, government agencies, and other healthcare organizations around the globe to

support their efforts to cope with COVID-19 and beyond.

We are enabling the efficient, rapid, and cost-effective scaling of technology and

infrastructure to help maintain clinical and operational continuity.

Click here to learn more about how AWS can help your organization. Please complete this form, and an AWS representative will contact you.

Or, click here if you’re ready to chat.

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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

START YOUR JOURNEY

TELEHEALTH SOLUTIONS KEY CONSIDERATIONS

COVID-19: LEARNINGS & OPPORTUNITIES

INTRODUCTION

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