Humanitarian aid workers collect medical supplies in Ukrainian basement café for distribution.Photo courtesy of XCH
As war ravages Ukraine, we are reminded of the true life and death necessity of access to health care. In addition to providing traditional care, hospitals, clinics, and emergency triage centers in the country must care for wounded soldiers and civilians—but they lack critical medical supplies. In the chaos of war, doctors and other medical practitioners find themselves with no centralized tool to request and track incoming supplies or monitor capacity at nearby hospitals, to better treat the wounded.
When the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and Ukraine public health agencies put out a call for assistance, XCH—a provider of situational awareness and incident management software tools to support health care providers in times of crisis—stepped up to the challenge. With the support of Amazon Web Services (AWS), XCH launched the Ukrainian Humanitarian Aid and Assistance System (UHAAS) to facilitate the communications required to provide emergency responders with real-time data for supply management. UHAAS builds on capabilities of XCH’s existing Advanced Management System (AMS), which provides software mapping dashboards which allow users to catalog, manage, and prioritize supply needs—and get urgent medical supplies into the hands of the doctors and nurses that need them most.
XCH initially expected that building, testing, and launching UHAAS would take up to six months, but thanks to the collaboration with AWS, the new solution was ready in just six weeks. The XCH team had to work quickly to create a new solution that combines the functionality of its existing software tools, while adding new features to track hospital bed capacity and patient transfers—all while meeting stringent data privacy and security needs.
AWS is supporting this critical effort with cloud computing credits and technical expertise—to accelerate and scale the build. AWS also provided free support for deployment, compliance requirements, and security to make sure the application stays online, no matter the circumstances. By integrating Amazon Translate, UHAAS harnesses powerful natural language processing capabilities to provide translation assistance, helping users overcome language barriers.
"We wouldn’t have been able to get this work done without the AWS team,” said Carl Taylor, CEO of XCH. “Not only did they jump at the chance to support us, but they moved with incredible speed.”
AWS continues to work with XHC to increase the ease of use of UHAAS for the health care professionals and aid workers who depend on its capabilities every day.
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