UC Davis Health and Amazon Web Services are collaborating on a cloud innovation center in Sacramento to explore new techniques to deliver health care without going to a hospital.
The center is based in the information technology offices of UC Davis Health in Sacramento, but it will likely be built out into its own center in the Aggie Square development in the future.
“It is a whole new way of reimagining how we deliver care in the home,” Dr. Ashish Atreja, chief information officer and digital health officer with UC Davis Health, told the Business Journal.
“With Covid-19, health care is undergoing changes, and there are more video chats in the home,” he said, but the innovation center is aiming for more opportunities for remote health delivery.
“We believe there is lot more that can be done,” Atreja said.
The center, which is Amazon Web Services' first partnership with an academic medical center, will be developing the concept of a hospital in the home, where patients consult remotely with physicians, and where health care workers can visit to draw blood, measure blood pressure and other physical needs.
The center will also work on training so that people who don’t have devices — or who don’t know how to use them — can access care.
“We want to take the digital divide and turn it into a digital bridge,” Atreja said.
That opens the potential for health equity, regardless of socio-economic status, geography, race and ethnicity, said Kim Majerus, vice president of U.S. public sector education, state and local government with Amazon Web Services, the cloud technology division of Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN).
Trained as a physician, Atreja has been working for 20 years on bringing technology to health care. He heads the 600-person information technology group at UC Davis Health.
The innovation center will work with patients, students, physicians and other health care systems to develop the technologies, Atreja said.
“Rather than tech that is built by outside firms,” and then configured for the hospital, Atreja said the innovation center will build the technology from the ground up using open-source software.
The center will also develop ways to manage remote health care, and will help bring it to scale, he said.
Amazon was attracted to UC Davis Health because it has a forward-thinking approach to health care, Majerus said.
The exact commitment of Amazon to the center is yet to be determined, she said, adding that “as they identify challenges, we will bring in resources.”
