Open Concept Lab (OCL) will receive computing credits and technical expertise from Amazon Web Services for supporting hosting and infrastructure to scale the centrally hosted instances of the OCL open source software and development infrastructure.
We are excited to announce that the Open Concept Lab (OCL) was selected as part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Health Equity Initiative, a $60 million, three-year commitment, supporting organizations that are developing solutions to advance health equity.
Through the initiative, AWS offers AWS credits and customized technical expertise to selected organizations around the world that want to use AWS services to improve health outcomes and health equity in any of the following areas:
- Increasing access to high-quality, culturally responsive health services – Eligible projects can include synchronous healthcare (i.e., real-time telephone or audio-video interactions); increased access to high-quality diagnostic services; addressing bias in the diagnostic development process; and cleaning existing data sets to improve accuracy for race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or other data points that will help to advance health equity for all.
- Increasing access to responsive social and community support – Eligible projects can include leveraging technology to improve access to social services, nutrition, transportation, housing, or economic opportunities to improve health outcomes. Additionally, projects can support research to deepen the understanding of and inform strategies to address disparities in social determinants of health.
- Mitigating the impact of climate change on health and quality of life – Eligible projects must proactively address diverse environmental health threats in an adaptive and culturally responsive manner. Projects could leverage technology and data to control the spread of cross-species infectious diseases, utilize geospatial analysis for mapping outbreaks, and improve equitable air quality monitoring with enhanced community access and data analysis capabilities.
“AWS believes individual health outcomes should not depend on socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, or neighborhood, “said Maggie Carter, Global Lead, Social Impact at AWS. “Cloud technology can help address inequities in global health to expand access to the services people need to live longer, healthier lives–no matter who they are or where they live. Through the AWS Health Equity Initiative, we look forward to helping Open Concept Lab and other organizations worldwide use the power of cloud computing to advance health equity and improve health outcomes.”
OCL serves the global health community, with a preferential focus on the support of underserved communities. The support from AWS will advance OCL’s efforts to lower barriers to adopting standardized health terminology, which is a critical component of ensuring that a patient’s health data can be used to provide high quality services, regardless of when and where it was collected or by whom.
Specifically, the AWS award will enable the following measurable enhancements for the OCL community:
- Enhanced OCL Online infrastructure to support anticipated growth in content and traffic, and to improve reliability of services. This would include: more powerful servers, clustering of priority services.
- New OCL devops and community infrastructure (e.g. discourse, confluence)
- Enhanced understanding of OCL users through improved analytics, especially via CloudWatch
The OCL community is thrilled to work with AWS on this project and we’re truly grateful for this opportunity.
To learn more about the AWS initiative, visit https://aws.amazon.com/health/health-equity.