- Inception Health is blazing a trail in healthcare, using AWS’ cloud tech to build a digital-first primary care clinic
- AWS said customers are also using its tech to streamline clinician tasks to allow more facetime with patients
- But there are still hurdles to overcome to truly capitalize on the cloud opportunity
There was a moment in 2020 during the Covid pandemic when everything in healthcare changed. Without the ability to bring patients into the office, medical systems had to find a way to bring care to them. And the only way to make telemedicine a viable reality was with the cloud. But that moment was just the beginning.
Now, healthcare providers are using the cloud to do everything from streamlining note taking to allow doctors more face time with patients to building entire virtual primary care clinics, executives from AWS and Inception Health told Fierce.
Melek Somai, VP and CTO at Inception Health, told Fierce that the experiences of the pandemic created room for a discussion about technology as critical component of healthcare services. And not just for doctors, but to increase access for patients as well.
“Technology offers us two things: it offers access because it can be everywhere 24/7 and convenience because you can do it from anywhere,” he said.
“Rather than technology being a back end solution for providers to help them deliver care, what if actually it’s the delivery of care?” Somai continued. That’s the idea behind Inception's new digital clinic, which allows individuals to become patients of primary care physicians without any physical time in an office.
The idea is shockingly simple. Like with modern banking, the healthcare experience of Inception’s clinic is “by default digital” but is backed up by a stack of clinical professionals whom the patient can access by phone, video visits or in-person when necessary.
All of this is built on AWS’ cloud services, which Somai said allows Inception to develop new tools and experiences in an “extremely secure environment” that exceeds the standards of even HIPPA requirements.
“Cloud offered us the ability to be fast, agile, really frugal, innovative and iterative, and building on the best technology that is actually generic across all other industries,” Somai said.
While it might seem like a throwaway line, that last bit – about the underlying technology being generic – is actually really important.
As Katie White, Inception Health’s Senior Engineering Manager, explained, it’s historically been difficult for healthcare to recruit top tech talent because of a perceived lack of innovation and proprietary tech stacks. But Somai said the cloud is changing all of that by allowing companies like Inception to bring in engineers from other industries who are already familiar with platforms like AWS. Those skills translate, he said, meaning new developers don’t need healthcare-specific knowledge.
Wheels in motion
Though Inception Health is a leading-edge cloud implementation, AWS Senior Physician Executive Angela Shippy told Fierce that healthcare systems use the cloud to innovate in various ways. The main themes? Operational efficiency, workforce advancement and patient experiences.
According to Shippy, workforce optimization has been the top priority for most AWS healthcare customers over the last several months.
What this means in practice is using tools like the cloud and generative AI to — for example — create visit summaries so clinicians can spend less time typing and more time face-to-face with patients.
These tools can also be used to create patient chart summaries that combine all the relevant details a physician needs in one handy package. While that seems like a simple change, it can make for more meaningful conversations with patients and aid with things like discharge planning, she said.
And there’s so much more to be done: Shippy noted that 97% of healthcare data goes unused.
“One of the conversations we have quite a bit with our customers is you have data from the electronic health record, you have payer data, you have data that’s coming to you maybe from a community health needs assessment. How do you bring all that together in a data lake and utilize that to give you true information that leads to insights,” she said.
One of the biggest issues healthcare systems face today, she added, is figuring out the nuts and bolts of the computing, storage, databases and other modernized infrastructure needed to make the new technology vision reality.
The other struggle? Shifting healthcare organizations out of the mindset that they can be followers instead of leaders.
“Having that ‘I won’t be first, but I won’t be last’ kind of approach isn’t going to work if you want to do some of these really new things about predictive analytics for supply chain and staffing, if you really want to move faster to accelerate the time to discovery and treatment,” she concluded.