Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a five-year, $100 million initiative to help healthcare organisations use AI and cloud technology to address health inequalities in underserved communities around the world.

The new AWS Health Impact Initiative will provide AI services, agentic AI capabilities and cloud infrastructure to health charities, government agencies, research organisations, technology companies and industry partners developing healthcare solutions. Organisations can apply for support to develop projects ranging from early-stage prototypes to production deployments.

AWS said the programme builds on its previous healthcare investments, which have supported more than 600 organisations across over 80 countries since 2021. It will focus funding on three areas: improving access to healthcare services, advancing research into women's and children's health, and expanding access to healthy food.

The first area includes projects that improve community healthcare, hospital services, diagnostics, research and healthcare infrastructure in rural and low-income regions.

The second targets longstanding gaps in medical research. AWS noted that only five per cent of health research funding focuses on women's health, while many medicines prescribed to children lack dedicated paediatric clinical validation.

The third area will support projects that improve food distribution, predict food security trends and expand access to nutritious food in communities facing food insecurity.

AWS highlighted several organisations already using its technology. These include Eve's Ark, which preserves women's health research datasets; Admera Health, which provides genomic sequencing for public health and research projects; Care 2 Communities, which has migrated patient records for clinics in Haiti to a cloud platform; and India's Akshaya Patra Foundation, which uses AWS to help distribute more than 2.35 million school meals each day.

Eligible organisations can apply through their AWS account team or a public application portal. Successful applicants will receive AWS credits based on their project requirements, with awards available for up to 24 months.

“Agents and AI are revolutionising health services, but these transformative technologies too often don’t reach the communities that need them most unless organizations know how to access and deploy them,” said Dr. Rowland Illing, chief medical officer and director, healthcare and life Sciences at AWS. “The AWS Health Impact Initiative helps organisations that support those communities to build with AI and extends our commitment to democratise AI and cloud-powered health innovations that benefit everyone, everywhere.”

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