New funding from Amazon Web Services, the Children’s Health Innovation Award, or Imagine Grant, will provide $7 million for cloud-based data resources for pediatric research, maternal child total health and empowering pediatric workforces and caregivers, according to an announcement made Wednesday at the AWS summit in Washington, D.C.

In addition, AWS has awarded three hospitals $1 million each to children's hospitals researching and treating pediatric cancer and developing tools and applications to improve screening for rare genetic diseases.

WHY IT MATTERS

Pediatric medical research is limited by restricted resources and limited sample sizes, as those parents who encounter a child's rare disease diagnosis can well attest. Children with cancer and other rare diseases often follow treatment plans adapted from adult protocols.

In particular, identifying genomic aspects of rare cancers requires sufficient computing power. However, most registered pediatric studies are small-scale, single-center and not funded, which slows progress in developing more effective treatments, according to AWS.

Access to cloud services, like secure data repositories that manage de-identified and anonymized data and artificial intelligence engines, could help move the needle, AWS explained in a statement on its website. 

By empowering nonprofit institutions with data-driven insights, researchers may better understand the genetic makeup of diseases and doctors could improve patient outcomes and experiences with more personalized treatments, the cloud giant said.

The $10 million initiative will support a consortium of hospitals and other institutions that use cloud computing and AI resources to accelerate research and discoveries. AWS has opened $7 million to organizations for projects that accelerate pediatric research, advance maternal-child total health or empower the pediatric workforce and caregivers.

The $3 million AWS has awarded through Imagine grants will be distributed between three organizations: Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.; Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio; and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network, located at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Nationwide is computing anonymized genomic data of pediatric cancer patients, the NCI Childhood Cancer Database, in a large study impacting pediatric cancer patients across the U.S. where researchers nationwide can access them – nearly in real-time, said AWS.

"What we really want to do is make rare cancers less rare by providing this comprehensive information to those who really want to investigate for a variety of discovery-based goals,” Elaine Mardis, co-executive director of the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine in the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, said in a statement.

"What’s driving discovery, in the most immediate term, is enabled by the cloud."

By leveraging AI, Children’s National Hospital is screening babies for rare genetic conditions by assessing facial features using smartphone cameras to identify subtle changes in those features shortly after birth. Researchers are testing the application on patients in 30 countries to help screen children who may not have access to a geneticist nearby, AWS said.

THE LARGER TREND

By 2018, 93% of hospital chief information officers were actively acquiring staff to develop HIPAA-compliant, next-generation cloud infrastructure, according to Black Book Research.

Technology can better serve pediatric care, according to Dr. William Hay, Jr., chief medical officer at Astarte Medical, a precision medicine company. 

"Too often, people have assumed children are small adults with small problems," he told Healthcare IT News in October.

"Children’s medical disorders are just as complex as those in adults, and many, probably most, set the child up – program the child – for later life complications."

Children with medical complexity account for less than 1% of all U.S. kids but contribute to one-third of all pediatric healthcare costs. Their disorders require "extensive evaluations, collection and analysis of extraordinary amounts of data" to be used to prevent adverse health outcomes, Hay explained.

ON THE RECORD

"We're so excited by the initiative that AWS is launching because it dovetails so perfectly into our narrative that despite being a rare disease, pediatric cancers truly provide a unique proving ground for new technology because of their dependency on real-time discovery and collaborative networks," said Adam Resnick, director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery in Biomedicine at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, in the AWS statement.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.

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