WHO Leverages Amazon Data Analytics Tools for COVID-19 Response

June 08, 2020 - The World Health Organization (WHO) is leveraging data analytics and cloud technologies from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate global efforts to track, contain, and understand COVID-19.

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Together with AWS, WHO recently launched an app to support health workers caring for patients with COVID-19, and to protect themselves as they do their jobs. The app allows workers to access WHO’s repository of educational material and guidance, as well as virtual workshops and live training.

Additionally, WHO has a COVID-19 situation dashboard, an interactive map that gives daily updates on the global- and country-specific numbers of COVID-19 cases. To help with this effort, AWS is providing automatic web content extraction, data analytics expertise, and open subject storage, which enables the retention of large amounts of unstructured information.

With these tools, WHO is able to share epidemiological data with its staff, public health bodies, Member States, and other health actors around the world in a timely manner.

"Thanks to support from tech companies, WHO was able to enhance the COVID-19 situation dashboard," said WHO Chief Information Officer Bernardo Mariano. "Countries rely on this data to see how well certain interventions are working in other countries, to help them decide whether to do the same."

WHO has also launched the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources Initiative (EIOS), which aims to develop a unified global early warning system using open-source information to identify, verify, and assess potential public health threats.

The EIOS system manages, filters, and helps contextualize information on specific public health topics, so it can be made available to the EIOS community of experts across the globe. The system picked up the first article related to COVID-19 in December, and by mid-March had collated more than 120,000 articles on the outbreak each day.

AWS is helping WHO develop a tool to enable collection and analysis of large volumes of COVID-19-related content from around the globe even more effectively. The tool will leverage machine learning to help differentiate between reliable and unreliable content, and will make information easier for the expert community to find and assess.

"This is where we are really seeing the power of AWS," said Mariano.

AWS is also supporting WHO’s efforts to manage the increased demand for information. Traffic to WHO’s website has increased almost eightfold since the beginning of the year, and AWS is providing the organization with increased computational capacity to help it scale rapidly and support the surge in demand. This will also ensure users around the world can access the website at any time.

In addition to these efforts, WHO has an interactive online platform called OpenWHO where frontline responders anywhere in the world can access a catalog of training courses on dealing with health emergencies.

Although WHO has made courses about the coronavirus outbreak quickly available, the challenge remains to make the content, primarily the video, available to more users by offering it in multiple languages. AWS will offer machine learning and media services to facilitate and accelerate the production of learning materials in multiple languages. AWS is aiming to help reduce the turnaround time on each piece of content from a few days to a couple of hours.

AWS has worked to help healthcare organizations around the world track and contain the spread of COVID-19. In March, the tech giant launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, a program with an initial investment of $20 million that will accelerate COVID-19 research and testing.

“As COVID-19 continues to spread, we are acutely aware of the impact this is having on families, businesses, and communities. This is a global health emergency that will only be resolved by governments, businesses, academia, and individuals working together to better understand this virus and ultimately find a cure,” Teresa Carlson, vice president for AWS’s worldwide public sector, wrote in a blog post.

“In our AWS business, one area where we have heard an urgent need is in the research and development of diagnostics, which consist of rapid, accurate detection and testing of COVID-19. Better diagnostics will help accelerate treatment and containment, and in time, shorten the course of this epidemic.”