Genomics research, agritech start-ups and emergency response witnessing rapid tech adoption

Usage of Cloud technology is transforming the lives of scores of people across the world, by making it possible to access health services remotely. Amazon’s cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a key player in the Indian public sector as it has been assisting the government in Covid-19 vaccination and telemedicine service eSanjeevani OPD. Max Peterson, Vice President, worldwide public sector, AWS, in an exclusive interview with BT talked about India’s digital growth story, new sectors that are adopting cloud, and investment plans for the country. Edited excerpts:  

BT: What is the potential you see in India in terms of cloud adoption in the public sector?  

MP: We continue to use the example of the Indian government’s development of a vaccine management scheduling system and the fact that it was built for the cloud, took advantage of all the scalability and flexibility of the cloud to build the CoWIN system. And it is still the largest vaccine management and scheduling system by patient size that we know around the world. The day it opened 1.9 million people hit the system. As of today, over 2.2 billion vaccines have been scheduled through it. And when you look forward, this is an area where the Indian government is demonstrating some of its digital leadership. Now taking the system that was built to respond to an emergency and reimagining it as a nationwide vaccine management platform has the potential to increase public health across the board. And then secondly, thinking about it as a digital public good and making that part of India’s Digital India programme, so that other countries other governments can benefit from the experience in the investment, and that the production tested value. That’s a really key thing that we continue to work on with Indian values such as telehealth, that was done with eSanjeevani OPD and the citizen service portal called the DigiLocker. Those to us are indications that the government in India continues to move forward on the digital modernisation and transformation path. What we want to do is we also want to kind of keep carrying that momentum now over to state governments.  

BT: What specific areas within the public sector are experiencing the most rapid technology adoption by the government?  

MP: Globally and in India as well, using AWS cloud services to accelerate research in healthcare in particular is one area that is seeing rapid technology adoption. There is also tremendous expansion in national governments doing population-scale genomics research. We are seeing a definite acceleration in agricultural weather and group observation and it is coming from agritech start-ups, governments, and emergency response requirements. Use of environmental science and melding with sensors and the cloud is an interesting pattern we are seeing. With the explosion in commercial space over the last two-and-a-half to three years, we’re seeing a lot of innovation in new areas for earth observations. Some of that gets applied to agriculture. For instance, we've done projects in India around agriculture and precision farming, using satellite data and earth observation. That is accelerating across the world. Health, space, agriculture, emergency preparedness, environmental awareness—driving a focus on sustainability, building solutions to provide better and more robust protections against food scarcity that we experience in places around the world, helps understand displaced populations and migrating populations, refugees. There’s a huge amount of application there and its very broad base. 

BT: What is the impact of AWS solutions on public sector organisations, especially after COVID-19? 

MP: We see start-ups that are working on that all over the globe and in India. We have worked with several different companies through the Covid-19 pandemic; we worked with Trigyn, and Ekacare. There’s just a lot of innovation that’s coming from these kinds of start-ups that are looking at health requirements across the board. Now with things like research or some of the Amazon HealthLake offerings, we’re seeing institutions come together and work collectively on data and science problems. Previously everyone kept their data locked up on-premise data centres and this type of collaboration was not easy. Amazon HealthLake is a service for clinical data ingestion, storage, and analysis. Amazon Healthlake in the AWS Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) Region was one of its first international deployments because we’ve been very focused on India.  

BT: The Covid-19 pandemic is receding. How do you see technology playing a role in the healthcare space going forward? 

MP: One thing that is helping to advance digital modernisation in healthcare is the trend of moving on-premise electronic health record systems to the cloud. On AWS, we support 14 of the 18 largest electronic health record systems across the world. That means hospitals, healthcare systems, and trusts, can finally start receiving the benefits of the cloud by taking formerly on-premise electronic health record systems and moving them to the cloud. By moving to the cloud they take advantage of the ability to scale up and scale down and get lower costs. Healthcare institutions get their electronic health records (EHR) in the cloud, move all of those related applications to the cloud, which gives them the beginning of their unified data strategy and that’s where one starts applying health analytics. One can start drawing to personalised medicine and deliver that better, or from the government perspective, be able to get population health disability so they can shape public health policy to be more effective. And so that's a great opportunity in front of us, aside from research, is just being able to make the hospital systems work better and more effectively, less expensively. 

BT: What are AWS’s investments plans for India? 

MP: We want to keep growing and investing in India’s public and commercial sectors. AWS has a long-term commitment to India and just last month announced plans to invest $12.7 billion in India by 2030 into our local cloud infrastructure. This is on top of our existing investments that we have got in the Hyderabad and Mumbai regions, and in local zones in Delhi and Kolkata. The total investment would come to $16.4 billion and what’s important about this is that it delivers cloud computing services to local start-ups or educational institutions and platforms like Samarth eGov, or governments use it to continue their digital modernisation. This planned investment will contribute $23.3 billion to India’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. And so purely from an economic development and jobs perspective, AWS is continuing to invest and continuing to benefit the Indian economy.