The future for solving healthcare's biggest problems is bright and cloud computing will play a vital role in the process, said Taha Kass-Hout, MD, chief medical officer for Amazon Web Services, in an April 20 interview in Medical Design and Outsourcing.
With previous experience at the FDA as chief health informatics officer and his current position at Amazon, Dr. Kass-Hout is well positioned to discuss the future of health technology and the cloud.
According to Dr. Kass-Hout, AWS has been used by medical technology companies to expand their footprint and pass strict security requirements and make technology more accessible and affordable. The cloud is also helping health systems organize the massive amounts of information coming from patients and providers.
"Health systems produce petabytes of unstructured data every day, and it's growing exponentially," he told Medical Design and Outsourcing. "This data is not easy to use or analyze, and at the moment 97 percent of this unstructured data is unused since it's difficult to structure and index and analyze. The cloud is helping a lot of these organizations make sense of all this data in order to provide the biggest opportunity to transform care."
Dr. Kass-Hout also believes that cloud computing and innovations in health technology will improve access to care and health equity.
"Promising innovations like precision medicine, conversational chatbots, intelligent scribes, and APIs for data and interoperability may make healthcare better and more efficient and more equitable in the future. The future is bright for anyone who's trying to solve problems in healthcare and life science globally."