AWS launches next AWS Healthcare Accelerator to propel startup innovation in health equity

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, health equity is achieved when every person can “attain his or her full health potential” and no one is “disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of social position or other socially determined circumstances.” Unfortunately, the pandemic has only amplified longstanding healthcare disparities, hitting vulnerable populations the hardest and highlighting that there is much work to be done to advance health equity.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we believe the cloud can help address long-standing social and structural disparities that impact health outcomes. While not a panacea, technology-enabled approaches can help organizations enhance and scale the impact of new and emerging interventions to address disparities in health.

That’s why we have chosen to focus the next AWS Healthcare Accelerator on health equity. Launching today, this accelerator builds on our larger focus on this issue that includes a $40M commitment we made last September to support customers developing solutions to reduce health inequities. This accelerator is one more way we are tackling this challenge, with a program specifically designed to support the startup community and its unique needs. 

Meeting the challenge of health equity with technology

The AWS Healthcare Accelerator, delivered in collaboration with KidsX, aims to empower all startups that focus on improving health equity. The program will support 10 startups with a four-week technical, business, and mentorship program. US-based healthcare startups, or international healthcare startups that have existing US operations, focused on one or more of the following areas will be considered:

1. Increasing access to health services: This includes technologies that enable patients to consult with health services almost anywhere in the world, help overcome distance barriers, and facilitate crucial care in emergency situations. Eligible solutions can include synchronous (i.e., real-time telephone or audio-video interaction) or asynchronous (i.e., patient portals) digital health solutions, remote patient monitoring, Internet of Things (IoT), language translation apps in healthcare settings, or digital tools to increase the availability and impact of health workers.
2. Reducing disparities by addressing social determinants of health: This includes technologies that address non-medical drivers of health, otherwise known as social determinants of health (SDoH), and can play an important role in reducing inequities and improving health. Eligible solutions can include leveraging technology to improve access to social services, food security, transportation, housing, or economic opportunities to improve health outcomes. We will also support research that deepens the understanding of and informs strategies to address SDoH.
3. Leveraging data to promote equitable and inclusive systems of care: This includes technologies that help create or consolidate datasets to increase representation in health systems; linking to SDoH data to create more robust and informative datasets; or cleaning existing datasets to improve accuracy about race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or other data points that will help to advance health equity for all.