Indian govt embraces Cloud to boost healthcare, citizen services: AWS' Max Peterson

Washington, May 24 As governments the world over lay more emphasis on healthcare after two years of the pandemic, the Indian government is creating a modern digital infrastructure with Cloud computing at its core to help address gigantic healthcare problems with speed and scale, a top Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive said on Tuesday.

Max Peterson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services (AWS), told that the company's previous collaborations with the Indian government on Cloud-based applications have helped the country solve real-life healthcare issues in less time.

"As India navigated through the pandemic especially the deadly second Covid wave the government responded well with speed and scale via cloud computing and creating a modern digital infrastructure (like CoWIN portal) to vaccinate over 1.3 billion Ind within record time," Peterson said on the sidelines of the AWS 'Public Sector Summit' here.

In Telangana, the state government collaborated with AWS to deploy a Covid-19 data platform that helped decipher inbound data, synthesise it and then displayed it on various dashboards to be able to predict pandemic outbreaks, requirement of hospital beds/oxygen supplies, and enhanced citizen awareness around he pandemic.

"At least 10 different Machine Learning (ML) models helped make sense of enormous sets of data points to get to right predictability and make better and informed decision-making in the state during that time," Peterson noted.

AWS' 'Project StepOne' took birth at the onset of the pandemic in early 2020.

It built a telemedicine solution on AWS Cloud to augment government Covid-19 response resources by allowing volunteers with the required background and skills to work remotely and directly into government systems.

According to the company, 'Project StepOne' has empanelled more than 12,000 volunteering doctors, has more than 30,000 total volunteers, and has supported more than 21 states and Union Territories.

During the second Covid wave (March 2021 onwards), 'Project StepOne' witnessed an average of around 5 million events and an incoming traffic load of around 2 million sessions per day, which it seamlessly scaled by 8 times since March by leveraging AWS services.

According to Peterson, public sector enterprises are now scaling digital services to enhance citizen experiences across the spectrum - from education to health and several other digital services for citizens.

"What we're seeing now is that public sector pioneers are rethinking the solutions to deliver enhanced citizen experiences. Healthcare is one of those great opportunities to pioneer the whole area of population health, or they've got a much bigger opportunity to think about personalised health," Peterson told .