As part of the agreement, the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona has already started to migrate its SAP environment to AWS in collaboration with Techedge, an AWS partner, and is introducing a modern SAP HANA platform, moving up to 9 terabytes of data. Running critical SAP workloads on the cloud will allow the institution to digitize administrative processes and operations, in order to provide better patient experiences and become a more data-driven organization. With this project, the Hospital Clínic will improve the availability and security of its corporate systems, optimize costs thanks to the pay-as-you-go cloud services model, and facilitate the scaling of the technological infrastructure according to the needs at any given time.
Moreover, the Hospital Clínic is building a data lake, which will also run on AWS cloud to enable advanced analytical capabilities, automate processes, obtain information from the data, and increase the operational agility and efficiency. With this data lake, the Hospital Clínic will gain visibility in internal and patient-oriented operations, allowing it to make decisions based on real data. This information will allow for the development of new tools to optimize user support, predict patient status and reduce mortality. The hospital has already used this data lake to anticipate and predict the worsening in the condition of COVID-19 patients, and has been able to make better decisions in advance and it hopes to reduce waiting lists by improving the efficiency of doctors’ schedules.
The collaboration between the Hospital Clínic and AWS is also aimed at creating a smart hospital through the use of AWS’s artificial intelligence and machine learning services. The Hospital Clínic plans to revolutionize patient care with technological tools that improve their experience both in hospital and at home. For example, the hospital plans to use Amazon Transcribe, an AWS service that automatically converts speech to text, to transcribe medical consultations, allowing doctors to focus on caring for the patient and not on the tedious task of writing down the details of each clinical case. The institution also plans to use Amazon Lex, a chatbot service with conversational artificial intelligence, to facilitate the management of appointments and to carry out telephone follow-ups of patient medication. At the operational level, the Hospital Clínic aims to implement image recognition systems, based on Amazon Rekognition, to track the movement of materials within the hospital in order to optimize the logistics flow.
This collaboration is another step forward in the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona’s commitment to technology and innovation. Under the agreement, AWS will become an associate member of CATI (Clinical Advanced Technologies Initiative), an initiative promoted by the Hospital Clínic and Leitat to create a centre devoted to innovation in digital health. This integration will allow CATI members to access technology and technical support from AWS.
According to David Vidal, Director of Information Systems at the Hospital Clínic, “there are great opportunities in data management that will generate well-being for our patients. In order to do this, we shall create a multidisciplinary working group at the Hospital, to prioritize specific use cases and focus on improving clinical and operational indicators".
Meanwhile, Dr. Lluís Donoso, Director of CATI, explains that “having a technological partner as powerful as AWS will allow us to offer great advantages to innovators in health that work with us and will help accelerate the processes of creation and improvement in the area of digital health”.
Carlos Jouve, Head of Healthcare at AWS in Spain, says that “thanks to this collaboration, the Hospital Clínic is already improving the healthcare experience for patients, evolving into a data-driven smart hospital. The breadth and depth of AWS’s cloud services allow the hospital to improve agility, increase the efficiency of processes and accelerate patient-centred innovation”.
