UC Davis Health has opened a cloud innovation center in partnership with Amazon Web Services, the not-for-profit academic health system announced Monday.
UC Davis Health, a Sacramento-based health system that's part of the University of California, Davis, is the latest to join Amazon's cloud innovation program open to not-for-profit organizations, educational institutions and government agencies.
UC Davis Health's center will solicit project ideas from clinicians, patients and the community focused on digital health equity and accessibility. The health system will make the project's findings available to the public to enable others to build on its work.
"Digital health equity has become a front-and-center issue, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic," UC Davis Health CEO David Lubarsky said in a news release. "Many of our underserved communities have struggled even more to receive the care they need, and the digital divide has only widened."
UC Davis Health and Amazon Web Services personnel will work with the center and identify problems that can be addressed with cloud technology. The partners didn't disclose financial details of the arrangement in the news release. Amazon will provide resources for the venture.
Download Modern Healthcare’s app to stay informed when industry news breaks.
The cloud innovation center is part of UC Davis Health's Digital Collaborative for Innovation and Validation, an innovation hub that aims to enable clinicians, researchers, students and community members to collaborate on digital health solutions. The collaborative also validates and tests new tools.
Amazon Web Services has been at the center of much of its parent company's push into healthcare. The cloud computing subsidiary has released cloud-based communication and documentation tools for healthcare organizations and struck partnerships with health systems like UPMC and health information-technology vendors like Cerner. Amazon's other health initiatives include Amazon Care and Amazon Pharmacy.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft have been forging cloud deals with healthcare entities as providers shift applications and data to the cloud to save costs and develop new technologies. Recently, HCA Healthcare partnered with Google Cloud and the hospital-backed data company Truveta made a deal with Microsoft's Azure.
Most healthcare organizations aren't moving all their applications and data to the cloud, even as interest in remote options grows. More than 60% are taking a hybrid approach, shifting some workloads to the cloud while keeping others housed in on-site data centers, according to a survey from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and the company Healthcare Triangle.
