According to an announcement made Wednesday at the AWS summit in Washington, DC, a new grant from Amazon Web Services, the Children’s Health Innovation Award or Imagine Grant, will provide $7 million to Cloud data source for pediatric research, overall maternal and child health, and empowering the pediatric workforce and caregivers.
Additionally, AWS has awarded three hospitals $1 million each to research and treat childhood cancer and develop tools and apps to improve screening for rare genetic diseases.
WHY IT MATTERS
Pediatric medical research is constrained by limited resources and limited sample sizes, as parents whose children have been diagnosed with rare diseases can well attest. Children with cancer and other rare diseases often follow treatment plans that are tailored to adult protocols.
In particular, identifying the genetic aspects of rare cancers requires significant computing power. However, most registered pediatric studies are small, single-center, and underfunded, which slows progress toward developing more effective treatments, according to AWS.
AWS explains in a statement on its website that access to cloud services, such as secure data storage that manages deidentified and anonymized data, and artificial intelligence tools creation, can help move the needle.
By empowering nonprofits with data-driven insights, researchers can better understand the genetic makeup of diseases and doctors, the cloud computing giant said. Physicians can improve patient outcomes and experiences with more personalized treatments.
The $10 million initiative will support a group of hospitals and other organizations using cloud computing and AI resources to accelerate research and discovery. AWS has opened $7 million to organizations to undertake projects that accelerate pediatric research, advance the overall health of mothers and children, or empower the pediatric workforce and caregivers.
The $3 million that AWS awarded through Imagine grants will be distributed among three organizations: Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC; Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio; and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network, located at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Nationwide is calculating anonymized genomic data of pediatric cancer patients, the NCI Children’s Cancer Database, in a large study impacting pediatric cancer patients across the United States, where researchers Research across the country can access this data – almost in real time, AWS said.
“What we really want to do is make rare cancers less rare by making this comprehensive information available to people who really want to do research for a variety of different discovery goals,” Elaine Mardis, co-executive director of the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said in a statement.
“What drives discovery, in the shortest amount of time, is cloud technology.”
Using AI, National Children’s Hospital is screening newborns for rare genetic diseases by assessing facial features with a smartphone camera to identify subtle changes in those features shortly after birth. Researchers are testing the app on patients in 30 countries to help screen children who may not have access to a nearby geneticist, AWS said.
THE BIGGER TREND
According to Black Book Research, by 2018, 93% of hospital CIOs were actively recruiting staff to develop next-generation HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure.
Technology can serve to better care for children, according to Dr. William Hay, Jr., chief medical officer at Astarte Medical, a precision medicine company.
“Too often, people assume that children are little adults with little problems,” he says. Healthcare IT News in October.
“Medical disorders in children are as complex as those in adults, and perhaps most of all, they predispose the child – program the child – to complications later in life.”
Children with complex medical conditions make up less than 1% of all children in the United States but contribute up to one-third of all children’s health care costs. Hay explains that their disorders require “assessment, collection, and analysis of exceptionally large amounts of data” to prevent adverse health outcomes.
ON PROFILE
“We are excited about the initiative AWS is taking on because it fits perfectly with our story that despite being a rare disease, pediatric oncology actually provides a unique testing ground for new technologies due to its reliance on real-time discovery and collaborative networks,” Adam Resnick, director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an AWS statement.
Andrea Fox is a senior editor at Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
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