The health workers around the world, who are taking care of COVID-19 patients are supported by an app, launched by WHO. This app enables workers to access the WHO’s bank of educational material and guidance, along with offering virtual skills workshops.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped the WHO to launch the app, in response to COVID-19.
It is one of multiple ways AWS is supporting the WHO with advanced cloud technologies and technical expertise, to help accelerate global efforts to track the coronavirus, understand its outbreak, and better contain its spread.
Making COVID-19 data available
The COVID-19 ‘situation dashboard’ of WHO gives a daily update on the latest global and country-specific numbers of COVID-19 cases.
The WHO Chief Information Officer Bernardo Mariano offered special thanks to tech companies for providing support. AWS is providing automatic web content extraction, expertise in data analytics and processing, and open object storage (which enables the retention of large amounts of unstructured information) to help the WHO to share epidemiological data with its staff, public health bodies, Member States, and other health actors around the world, in a timely way.
Supporting a public health 'early warning system'
Using open source information, such as news articles and reports, The WHO's Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources initiative (EIOS) aims to develop a unified global early warning system to identify, verify, and assess potential public health threats.
AWS provided support to the WHO developing a tool to enable collection and analysis of large volumes of COVID-19-related content from around the globe even more effectively. The tool will use machine learning to help differentiate between 'reliable' and 'unreliable' content, and will make information easier for the expert community to find and assess.
"This is where we are really seeing the power of AWS," said Bernardo.
Managing increased demand for information
Traffic to the WHO website has increased almost eight-fold since the beginning of the year, as more and more medical professionals and members of the public look for reliable, expert-led information on the coronavirus outbreak.
AWS is providing the WHO with increased computational capacity to help it scale rapidly and support the surge in demand, and to ensure users around the world can access the website at any time.
Training more frontline responders
OpenWHO is the WHO's interactive online platform, where frontline responders—including healthcare professionals—anywhere in the world, can access a catalog of training courses on dealing with health emergencies.
While the WHO has quickly made courses relating to the coronavirus outbreak available, the challenge remains to make the content—primarily video—available to more users by offering it in multiple languages.
AWS is providing machine learning and media services to facilitate and speed up the production of learning materials in multiple languages. The goal is to help reduce the turnaround time on each piece of content from a few days, to a couple of hours.
