Both the FDA and CDC rely on AWS, as does the U.K.’s National Health Service, according to Kass-Hout, who previously served as the FDA’s chief technology officer and first chief health informatics officer in 2013. The Minnesota Health Department also built up a governor’s COVID-19 notification system “in a matter of weeks on AWS” without having to invest in additional technologies, Kass-Hout said.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, COVID hit just as the U.K. was withdrawing from the European Union. Residents were anxious about their health coverage and how the National Health Services (NHS) would operate in a post-Brexit world. AWS was able to help buoy an overworked call center staff, struggling with labor shortages as more employees got sick with Covid, by building up an intelligent call center that could answer some of the most frequently asked questions about coverage and, later on, about vaccines and treatments, Kass-Hout explained.
It’s a few paces behind ChatGPT, the natural language bot which recently captured public attention, but the real use case brings back the potential for the technology after it soured in the years after IBM Watson’s decline. But it wasn’t just governments that benefitted this time. Moderna (MRNA) relied on a program built on AWS, to determine the right COVID vaccine candidate, and Pfizer (PFE) and AstraZeneca (AZN) have similarly been using AWS, according to Kass-Hout.
