Kyle Schilke
I have been a long time supporter of CHIEF throughout my career. Cloud is still relatively new in the Canadian Public Healthcare space, so I recognized the impact AWS could have on getting better outcomes for patients. As a member of the CHIEF Advisory committee I am passionate about sharing our story and how much we learn about our customers, how we’re able to collaborate with them and include additional providers and partners to help build solutions that meet the ever changing needs of the Canadian Healthcare space. CHIEF allows both customers and providers/partners to set aside name tags and titles and work in a collaborative environment to tackle unique and sometimes extremely complex healthcare technology problems.
In 1999, when I moved to Toronto to begin my career in technology, my first role was supporting customers in Atlantic Canada—some of them I still work with today nearly 25 years later. I’ve always been impressed with the evolution of my customer’s technical skills over the years, and their passion for using technology to bring together various teams to solve common issues. As my career changed from IT hardware to consulting services to software, and now to cloud—I continued to see digital health making a difference in the lives of everyday Canadians. That’s perhaps the most rewarding part of my career, seeing how big and small changes in tech have had a profound impact on healthcare in Canada. Now with cloud services, I see those changes expedited and making a difference in this country and globally. We’re just at the tipping point of interoperability and that for me signals that there is still more work for me to do with my customers.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a dedicated life sciences and genomics practice composed of folks who have been in the industry for years. It includes a team of people who have been bedside with patients, including physicians, and nurses. We also have a large number of researchers. For me, one of the delights of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Health & Life Sciences practice is that we get to work with a large ecosystem of customers and partners. When we look at the mission or vision of every single organization we work with, they always reference to the word “patient”. That is very important to AWS because the work we are doing with these organizations is intended to benefit people.
Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing start-ups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
To continue helping customers during these unprecedented times, AWS is collaborating with healthcare providers, public health organizations, government agencies, and life science businesses around the globe to support their efforts to cope with the ripple effect of COVID-19. This includes providing customers in the most affected regions with technical support and AWS Promotional Credits to help cover costs of initiatives related to COVID-19 response. This includes the $20 million AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative supporting customers bringing better, more accurate diagnostic solutions to market faster.
We are helping organizations quickly scale their technology and infrastructure to help maintain clinical and operational continuity for our global healthcare system. Increasing contact center efficiency with web chatbots and voice conversational agents will supplement staff to help triage patients, protecting and scaling clinical staff through remote visits via telemedicine, enabling a remote work force and global research collaboration with cloud desktop and application streaming solutions, are all opportunities for healthcare organizations to work together on during this difficult time.
Healthcare providers around the world are using AWS to deliver improved care to their patients by reducing the time and effort required to run existing workloads, providing access to powerful new analytics capabilities, all while meeting the security and privacy requirements.