AWS’s Peter Moll on how technology can help Cyprus establish itself as a regional medical hub

Moll recently visited Cyprus to speak at the 7th Cyprus HealthCare Conference in Nicosia, as an honored guest of Logicom Public Ltd, AWS Distributor in Cyprus, Greece, Romania, and Malta and proud sponsor of the event.

Peter Moll MD, Business Development Lead for Academic and University Medical Centers EMEA, World Wide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services recently revealed how technology can be used to support Cyprus’ efforts to establish itself as a regional medical hub.

“As Cyprus works to establish itself as a regional medical hub, there are great opportunities for us to support the digital transformation and data management needs of the healthcare ecosystem here,” Moll noted.

His comments to CBN came after Moll addressed the 7th Cyprus HealthCare Conference in Nicosia where he spoke about ‘Better data. Better insights. Better outcomes. – Paradigm Shift in Health Data Management through the Cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS)’.

In his interview with the portal, Moll, among other things, also talks about how technology is helping the global healthcare sector address chronic and new challenges, and why AWS is dedicated to being a trusted technology and innovation partner to the world’s healthcare and life sciences industry.

You spoke about ‘Better data. Better insights. Better outcomes. – Paradigm Shift in Health Data Management through the Cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS)’ at the recent 7th Cyprus HealthCare Conference. Can you reveal some of the points you addressed in your talk?

Sure! We are facing huge challenges in healthcare globally. Shortage of professionals, increasing costs, siloed data – 97% of data from a patient is not accessible for professionals, inequity in healthcare data – just to name a few. We need to and we have already initiated a paradigm shift in dealing with healthcare data by utilizing AWS cloud services and partner solutions in order to make the existing data, this treasure, more accessible and usable. It is not without reason that we have coined the slogan "Better data. Better insights. Better outcomes." The paradigm shift can be seen in four ways: Firstly, in how data models are structured in a new way. Secondly, how access to data is managed. Thirdly, how applications are brought to the data. And fourthly, how the right technology is used to optimize data processing. Let me put this in concrete terms. In the past, data warehouse systems were set up where, for example, clinical and financial data were merged and perhaps enhanced with analytics. However, the idea of "lifting" these data warehouses into the cloud and taking them to the next level is a misconception. Using scalable infrastructure is certainly part of the paradigm shift, but what is meant is moving away from data warehouse approaches, i.e. from a predefined, structured data model, and instead building so-called health lakes. A great example is Genomics England (GEL) which build a trusted and secure environment for cancer and rare disease research processing 100,000 whole genomes since 2018, facilitating AWS cloud and leveraging from the paradigm shift in healthcare data management. GEL and the UK Biobank will sequence up to 5 million genomes within 5 years.

AWS has a dedicated sector for Healthcare & Life Sciences, indicating the importance the company places on healthcare services. Can you tell us more about AWS’s role in this exciting new sector?

AWS is the trusted technology and innovation partner to the global healthcare and life sciences industry, providing unmatched reliability, security, and data privacy. Healthcare and life science organizations are reinventing how they collaborate, make data-driven clinical and operational decisions, enable precision medicine, and decrease the cost of care. To help healthcare and life science organizations achieve business and technical goals, AWS for Healthcare & Life Sciences provides an offering of AWS services and AWS Partner solutions used by thousands of customers globally. Our mission is “To enable access and delivery of person-centered healthcare, driving improved outcomes at a lower cost by accelerating the digitization and utilization of healthcare & life sciences data.”

We describe in our whitepaper “Paradigm Shift in Health Data Management through the Cloud” how AWS can support Healthcare and Life Science organisations to unlock the potential of their data. The whitepaper can be downloaded via this link (https://pages.awscloud.com/HealthDataManagement-Learn-More.html). Please download the whitepaper free of charge and get in touch with us. We are more than happy to discuss your opportunities and challenges.

Further to the above, although healthcare and life science organizations have been using technology such as AI and ML for some time, newer products such as generative AI are anticipated to bring about new possibilities to accelerate innovation in the sector. Can you tell us more about how you expect this type of new technology impact the industry and what you anticipate the Cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) role will continue to be in developing and promoting new tools?

AI, ML, GenAI is easily accessible in the cloud. While healthcare and life science organizations have been using AI and ML for years, generative AI brings new possibilities to accelerate innovations, increase efficiencies, and improve outcomes across the health continuum. From generating new therapeutic candidates, to better matching patients with the right clinical trials, to powering patient engagement applications, AWS makes it easier to access the services, data, models, and secure infrastructure needed to scale generative AI across your organization. With Amazon Bedrock, which is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. Using Amazon Bedrock, you can easily experiment with and evaluate top FMs for your use case, privately customize them with your data using techniques such as fine-tuning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and build agents that execute tasks using your enterprise systems and data sources. Since Amazon Bedrock is serverless, you don't have to manage any infrastructure, and you can securely integrate and deploy generative AI capabilities into your applications using the AWS services you are already familiar with. Let me give you a simple example. Speech recognition. The quality is not the same in a purely on-prem world because resources cannot be scaled to the same extent. This is as well confirmed by our partners: However, good data is as much important for the use of AI than AI by itself. In the exciting landscape of generative AI, AWS stands out for two main reasons, which I often highlight to our customers. First, AWS's extensive data and experience in building AI responsibly is unparalleled, honed through years of customer service. Second, AWS is unique in its approach to providing choices. This flexibility is crucial, allowing customers to evaluate and select solutions that best meet their unique requirements.

As BDM Lead, your remit encompasses Academic Medical Centers/University Medical Centers in the EMEA region, which includes Cyprus. The island is working to become a regional medical hub with a number of medical schools created and several international healthcare groups establishing a presence here. Is Cyprus also part of any upcoming Cloud Amazon Web Services’ plans and developments, both in health data management and beyond?

The healthcare sector has been gradually increasing its adoption of cloud computing services like AWS for data management, storage, analytics, and other IT infrastructure needs. This trend is driven by the potential benefits of cloud platforms, such as scalability, security, and cost-efficiency. As Cyprus works to establish itself as a regional medical hub, there are great opportunities for us to support the digital transformation and data management needs of the healthcare ecosystem here. Cloud infrastructure and services can enable medical institutions to manage growing volumes of health data and leverage advanced analytics capabilities. AWS does have a global footprint and has been actively expanding its cloud regions and service offerings around the world, including Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). We have also formed partnerships with various healthcare organizations and research institutions globally and with our presence in the region, and attending conferences like this one here, we show our commitment into the market and the region.

On a more personal note, how has your background in direct patient care helped you in the Health Data Management sector?

Thanks to my experience in direct patient care and my work in clinics for almost two decades - from small to large - I don't just look at the challenges from the outside, but know very well and from the inside how challenging healthcare can be. Because of my background and my role at AWS, I am seen as a trusted partner, as are my colleagues who have a similar background. In discussions, we can usually talk very quickly about meaningful solutions without having to explain all the basics first. These can simply be taken for granted. This makes us as AWS a dialogue partner at eye level and we can act as thought leaders together with our customers. This clearly sets us, AWS, apart from our market competitors.