Category: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The UC Davis Health Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) will focus on digital health equity and will use Amazon’s Working Backwards principles and methodologies to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities. The CIC will allow clinicians or clinical care providers, patients, and developers to exchange ideas, as well as prototype and validate open-source solutions focused on making digital health more equitable and accessible worldwide. Among the 13 AWS CICs globally, this will be the first CIC based at an academic medical center.

Across Canada, hospitals, care providers, academic health sciences centers, and more are using accessible, scalable technology to support their staff and provide faster, better access to citizens in need of care. With Amazon Alexa, patients only need their voice to answer a few questions and get started towards healing.

AWS is announcing a new global program to support organizations working to enhance health outcomes for underserved or underrepresented communities. We are providing AWS credits and technical expertise, committing $40 million over three years to help organizations develop solutions to improve health outcomes.

Healthcare organization Dr. B launched to get as many COVID-19 vaccines into as many arms as possible. To achieve its mission to make access to care—specifically the COVID-19 vaccine—more efficient and equitable, the company created a serverless solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).   

The first step to narrow the financial inclusion gap between Indian citizens in urban and rural areas is for the government to extend financial services to the underserved. Mission-driven startups in the private sector collaborated with AWS to design and deliver new products in the cloud that helped advance financial inclusion in India by working on a range of challenges, from boosting credit growth to bringing citizen services through platforms.

Building on our longstanding commitment to supporting small businesses and underrepresented communities, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing in Black-owned businesses in collaboration with Hello Alice, a free, multichannel platform that helps small businesses launch and grow. We invited Elizabeth Gore, co-founder and president of Hello Alice, to share how the organization is helping small businesses, and how small business owners can apply for a grant from Amazon’s Black Business Accelerator (BBA).

In 2020, AWS and Halcyon launched the Halcyon 2021 Bahrain Women’s Intensive, which aims to foster leadership and scale early-stage, women-run businesses based in Bahrain. The program seeks to inspire female tech entrepreneurs in Bahrain—one of the fastest growing ecosystems in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for impact-oriented business—and the broader region. One of the Intensive participants is Wafa Alobaidat, founder of Women Power Network, an organization that aims to accelerate the success of women founders and professionals through networking and live events including the Women Power Summit. Here are five key entrepreneurship lessons that Alobaidat has learned through her work.

According to FAIR Health and the American Medical Association, telehealth use saw a nearly 3000% growth from pre-pandemic to during the pandemic. These services make virtual, real-time interactions between patient and provider possible. However, the great promise of telehealth has highlighted existing roadblocks that some face when trying to access healthcare in this country. The National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT) is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization on a mission to provide equitable access to health technologies and to make sure that these technologies address the needs of underserved communities and communities of color. Since its founding in 2008, NHIT has worked to advance health equity and economic viability on issues such as broadband access, electronic health records, precision medicine, consumer health applications and disaster resiliency.

At AWS, we place a high priority on innovation. And innovation is best served by a diverse team, which is why we support organizations like Girls in Tech, a global nonprofit of more than 70,000 members, that advocates for diversity, equality, and inclusion in the technology industry. A report from NCWIT found that women earned 57% of all bachelor’s degrees in 2019, yet only 21% of computer and information sciences bachelor’s degrees. And while women hold 57% of all professional occupations in the US workforce, they hold only 26% of all computing occupations. And, the numbers of women in STEM drop down to the low single digits when you look at BIPOC women. It is clear—the time for change is now.

Diversity matters. Governments, countries, cities, agencies, and more recognize the value that diversity brings. According to McKinsey, companies with ethnic or cultural diversity are 33% more likely to outperform on profitability. With this in mind, I am thrilled to announce the global launch of the Think Big for Small Business Program. With the global launch of this program, I wanted to share the three things I like most about it.