# Appendix A. Meeting the healthcare organization's goals Simplify data access, reduce administrative overhead, minimize patient data entry, and provide personalized information. ## Improve patient experience Patient experience encompasses the range of interactions that patients have with the healthcare system. A modern healthcare-data strategy can improve the patient experience by: + Simplifying data access for patients and clinicians + Reducing administrative overhead + Minimizing patient data entry requirements + Providing personalized information about conditions, treatments, risks, disease management, clinical trials, and emerging therapies Your organization can use digital front door or patient portal services enabled by the modern healthcare-data strategy. These services, which are offered by AWS Partners, guide each patient from the discovery of health services through discharge and follow-up. Key digital front door capabilities include online scheduling options, online health surveys, and patient access to integrated multimodal health data. That data includes imaging and genomic data across multiple healthcare providers and labs. The modern healthcare-data strategy supports call center modernization, including [chatbots](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/leveraging-healthcare-chatbots-at-your-digital-front-door/) to provide basic information 24/7/365, backed by an omnichannel multilingual contact center using [Amazon Connect Customer](https://aws.amazon.com/connect/). ## Improve outcomes across populations Population health focuses on interrelated conditions and factors that influence the health of populations. It also identifies systemic variations in patterns related to these factors. Finally, it applies the resulting knowledge to develop and implement policies and practices to improve the health and well-being of those populations. Health systems can achieve improved health outcomes with reduced costs by bridging the gap between population health and healthcare delivery. A modern healthcare-data strategy can help improve population health outcomes by: + Segmenting patient populations based on their attributes + Identifying risk factors across communities + Using primary medical-care home-delivery models + Using evidence-based screening and prevention in assigned populations + Focusing on overall health + Moving from volume-based to value-based care To develop a healthcare-data system that improves population health, healthcare organizations should be able to integrate internal and external data sources. The data can include clinical data and data related to health behaviors, social and economic status, physical environmental, claims, cost, and patient engagement. Your healthcare organization should also be able to produce a baseline for a target population relative to a goal. For example, to prevent substance abuse, health systems must understand the prevalence of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse within the population. They also need to be able to define populations that could benefit from interventions, understand the total cost of care, and perform ongoing analysis to validate whether initiatives are having the intended effect. ## Reduce costs by optimizing operations Health systems face fiscal challenges caused by changing reimbursement rates, increased labor costs, increased costs for medications and supplies, and inflation. Health systems—which commonly operate on thin margins with limited resources—benefit from adopting cost-saving measures to optimize the use of their limited resources. Comprehensive, aggregated data increases visibility into the expenses associated with interventions across the continuum of care. Health systems can use this data to discover new mechanisms that reduce expenses, generate income, and speed up cash flow. By doing so, they can focus on keeping patients healthy and keeping hospital doors open. A modern healthcare-data strategy can help health systems can save on costs by: + Optimizing scheduling and capacity planning based on patient flow. This optimization can reduce provider burnout while increasing patient engagement. + Estimating propensity to pay by using predictive models, and using this data to develop different strategies for collecting payment. + Giving practitioners access to critically assess research data, clinical guidelines, and other information resources to correctly identify clinical problems. Practitioners can then apply the highest-quality interventions, and re-evaluate the outcomes for improved results in the future. ## Automate tasks to improve the provider experience Clinicians struggle to balance patient care with the volume of routine tasks that they are required to perform every day. They grow frustrated when they are unable to access comprehensive patient-specific data at the point of care. Workloads and hours are excessive, medical records are incomplete, and working environments are often challenging. These factors contribute to ever-increasing levels of burnout and dissatisfaction among workers in healthcare-related organizations. A modern healthcare-data strategy can help improve the work experience of clinicians and providers by: + Giving clinicians access to historical information about patients so they can provide higher-quality care to a greater number of patients, which optimizes patient outcomes + Automating administrative tasks, reducing the burden on providers + Creating a holistic patient view by providing comprehensive medical records at the point of care + Creating systems that facilitate the seamless exchange of records between providers + Facilitating the management of patient consent and other compliance-related requirements ## Increase equity by using data to understand and identify disparities To improve healthcare outcomes for broad populations, health systems must understand where care disparities exist, what their magnitudes are, and the reasons why they occur. With this information, organizations can begin to develop plans for improving the care of all patients. Healthcare organizations might not be aware of barriers patients face during the usual course of care. Organizations might also be unaware of factors outside of the healthcare system that play a role in health inequities. Health outcome data is the most reliable way to identify the type and magnitude of disparities. A modern healthcare-data strategy can help reduce healthcare disparities by: + Providing care options that overcome distance barriers, such as virtual care systems, patient portals, and remote patient monitoring + Providing solutions to improve access to social services, food security, transportation, housing, or economic opportunities + Creating or consolidating datasets to create robust and informative datasets + Cleaning existing datasets to improve their accuracy regarding race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or other known determinants of inequality + Correcting algorithmic bias ## Advance healthcare through genomic research Genomic information is instrumental in identifying inherited and rare disorders. It's also a vital tool for characterizing the mutations that drive cancer progression, and for tracking disease outbreaks. Genomics sits at the core of personalized health. By taking individual variability among people and diseases into account, clinicians can create personalized care journeys and targeted treatments. By adopting a modern healthcare-data strategy, research organizations can advance healthcare by: + Determining genetic variants to aid diagnosis and treatment of diseases, help discover disease biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets, and guide targeted therapies. + Identifying genotype information that can be used for clinical applications. This information can be used in the development of polygenic risk scores that are used for early detection, prevention, or treatment of disease. + Developing biological insights from genomic data, which can inform drug discovery and clinical applications. + Using genomics to better understand the evolution of a disease, trace its progressions, and develop tests quickly. + Using multi-omics data along with clinical information to derive useful insights into cellular functions. ## Improve healthcare-system sustainability Healthcare systems are adopting new sustainability goals. To define and meet their system goals, they are exploring new tools. These tools can help them understand and optimize not only their IT carbon footprint, but also the materials they use, and the entire supply chain that produces these materials. For IT, data storage and processing are a large and growing component of the organization's carbon footprint. By adopting a modern healthcare-data strategy, healthcare organizations can: + Use cloud services to optimize IT storage and data-processing resource usage, and migrate health IT workloads to renewable power and sustainable water resources. + Analyze supply chains to identify more sustainable products. As Amazon states in the [Climate Pledge](https://www.aboutamazon.com/planet/climate-pledge), "We believe we have an obligation to stop climate change, and reducing carbon emission to zero will have a big impact. We want to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement, and we are on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025 as part of our goal to reach net-zero carbon." Amazon documents its sustainability approach and programs on the [Amazon Sustainability home page](https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/). In particular, the AWS infrastructure is [3.6 times more energy efficient](https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/) than the median of US enterprise data centers surveyed by 451 Research, and it will be [water positive](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-water-positive-by-2030) by 2030. Sustainability is a pillar in the [AWS Well-Architected Framework](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/sustainability-pillar/sustainability-pillar.html), which guides customers on achieving sustainable IT practices and supply chains. AWS provides a [customer carbon footprint tool](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/what-is-ccft.html) that customers can use to understand their IT carbon footprint. Customers can use [AWS Supply Chain](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-supply-chain/features/) features to optimize their supply chain, including their sustainability impact.